


Shell Game

by Wind_Ryder



Series: Methuselah's Children [10]
Category: The Old Guard (Movie 2020)
Genre: Angst and Hurt/Comfort, Attempted Rape/Non-Con, Bad coping mechanisms, F/F, Happy Ending, Kidnapped, M/M, Manipulation, Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder - PTSD, Separation, Trauma
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-06
Updated: 2020-08-21
Packaged: 2021-03-06 06:40:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 18
Words: 85,040
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25738963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Wind_Ryder/pseuds/Wind_Ryder
Summary: Slowly, Nicky says: “Who has Joe?”Nonsensically, Booker looks to Nile. Her brows furrow as Nicky and Andy follow his gaze. Nile holds her hands up as if to deny it, but then alarm takes refusal’s place. “Oh my God.” Her hands clasp around her mouth. So. She had seen something.“Nile?” Andy asks. It isn’t gentle. It’s commanding. Firm. She wants an answer. Booker wishes there’s a better answer to give her.“It’s...is it?” Nile asks Booker, and he finds himself the center of attention once more.“Quynh,” he says. “Quynh took Joe. Put him in a...a metal coffin. I don’t know where she went.” Nicky’s fingers go tight around Booker’s shoulder and knee. All the color has drained from his face. All his concern and worry replaced with frightening blankness.Then, Nicky stands. He walks out the door. And he doesn't look back.
Relationships: Andy | Andromache of Scythia/Quynh | Noriko, Booker | Sebastien le Livre & Nicky | Nicolo di Genova, Joe | Yusuf Al-Kaysani/Nicky | Nicolò di Genova
Series: Methuselah's Children [10]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/1839811
Comments: 2330
Kudos: 1634





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> This story is the direct sequel to Le Livre. You must read Le Livre prior to reading this. It's strongly recommended you read the other parts of this series too, as it will provide contextual information moving forward. 
> 
> Tags may change.

Most nights, when Booker doesn’t have some kind of booze or drug to numb his thoughts, he dreams of Quynh. She’s irritatingly consistent in dragging his thoughts up from the abyss. Who needs missions where dead bodies pile at the end of his gun to produce nightmares, when every night he could dream of a woman screaming underwater, desperate to be free? She gives as good as she gets too. She claws at the iron coffin, beats it with her fists. She kicks with her shackled feet. Sometimes she even breaks her toes she kicks so hard. Booker is Quynh’s captive audience. 

He wonders what she sees through his eyes, in turn. Nicky and Joe? Tangled in each other’s arms? Andy turning him down when he dared to flirt one too many times? The results of Andy’s late night conquests? Or maybe, maybe she sees them on missions. Maybe she sees them slaughtering their enemies and rescuing the innocent. Maybe she just sees Booker drinking his life away, desperate to get as far away from her as possible. 

Most nights, Booker wakes flinching. He presses his hands to his head and he tries to out press the pain of thousands of pounds of water pressure crushing his skull. He drinks desperate gulps of water, trying to chase the taste of salt from his tongue. He tries very hard to not think about the ocean, the beach, or anything related to the sea. 

_Most_ nights, Quynh is in her coffin—angrily trying to escape. She’s not standing in his kitchen, drinking water from a glass, and waiting for him to speak. Booker doesn’t really know what to say, though. Whenever he imagined actually meeting Quynh, it came in the form of some massive rescue operation. Andy would dive down and pull Quynh up and there’d be lots of hugging on the deck and he’d introduce himself but know that it wasn’t his place to intrude too much on the family reunion taking place five hundred years too late. He never imagined being the one to welcome Quynh back to the world. Never imagined _she’d_ be the one to take the initiative herself. 

“Nothing to say?” Quynh asks him, licking her lips to chase the last touch of water from her skin. He lowers the gun he had aimed at her head the moment he’d walked in the door. It loiters impatiently at his side, waiting to be used. 

He’s had a lot to drink tonight, he knew that before he even came home. _Fuck Joe,_ he’d thought. _And fuck Nicky too,_ because Nicky earned it for trying to reschedule Book Club, and Joe’s an asshole. Booker just hadn’t thought he’d drunk so much he’d start hallucinating Quynh in his flat. 

She settles her water glass down on his table and approaches with the kind of dancer-step that Andy always seemed to have. Smoothe and elegant and enticing. Booker’s throat tightens as he looks at her. As he smells her. She smells like something floral and industrial. A complementary soap offered at a decent hotel. 

Quynh stops when their toes are almost touching. He can taste her breath in the air. She smiles at him and it looks nothing like the tortured smile of a woman he’d stalked in his dreams for centuries. “It’s all right,” Quynh suggests. “You don’t have to say anything.” 

Then she stabs him right between his ribs, and he dies before he has a chance to process what exactly happened. 

* * *

Booker wakes up with his hands tied above his head. His outershirt’s been removed, leaving him in a blood-stained T and sagging jeans. She’d taken his boots and belt as well. Looking up, he finds his belt has been recommissioned to hold his hands into place. He’s strung up from the rafters with belts and bedsheets and it’s so ridiculous he almost laughs. He still can’t pull his hands free, though, and his mouth is gagged with something soft and awful. So the laughter waits as he looks around. 

Quynh’s closed the front door and locked it. The pile of blood he’d made after he died has soaked through his floorboards, though. He’s going to lose his deposit. There’s something cooking behind him, but he can’t turn his head well enough to see. He can only listen as she moves just out of sight, humming a tune that he doesn’t have a chance in hell in recognizing. He bets it was written thousands of years ago. 

“I learned much from you,” Quynh says. “All this technology. It’s very different from _before._ Thank you for letting me see so much. _”_

 _I didn’t_ let _you do anything,_ Booker thinks as he jerks on his wrists. They don’t budge at all. He growls something against the cloth in his mouth, hating how it muffles. His tongue presses against it and his teeth gnash in desperation. It doesn’t shift at all. He wouldn’t be entirely surprised if he chokes on it at one point. She doesn’t need to worry about killing him. Not really. Not for _good._

“It is much faster cooking this way than before. More convenient too. Though you don’t shop nearly as much as you should. Just wasting your money on books.” Booker grunts loudly and swings his body in a mad attempt to use leverage to dislodge himself. The attempt fails. 

Something settles in the kitchen. A utensil against a metal pan, perhaps. He hears it klink as it slides into place. The knob clacks when she turns off the gas. A few moments later there’s even the sound of food being moved from the pan to a plate. The pan returns to the stove. And then footsteps finally lead her around to face him. 

She’s removed the red coat she’d worn when she’d first arrived. He doesn’t know where it’s ended up, but probably someplace that he wouldn’t like. If tonight’s anything to go by, she seems the type to not respect boundaries. Beneath her coat, though, she’s dressed like a modern woman. A nice shirt, some slacks. Even some decent boots. She’s got makeup on. A manicure. 

In one hand she has a platter of eggs. In the other, a fresh glass of water. The sight of it turns his stomach and he scowls at her as best he can through the gag in his mouth. She doesn’t bother trying to remove it. Instead, she sits in one of his chairs, sets the glass to the side, and holds the plate on the flat of her palm. Quynh keeps her eyes on his as she delicately forks eggs into her mouth. “It was nice of you to spend so much time watching Nicolo cook.” The reminder makes his stomach curdle. It _does_ smell like something Nicky would make. Filled with peppers and onions and cheese. She takes another bite and pointedly ignores him when he tries to talk once more. 

“Tell me, did you ever fuck Nicolo?” The profanity more than anything sends him back to silence. He blinks at her, stupid in his incomprehension. She’s not what he expected. Not really. Over the years he’d imagined her any number of ways, but most came as variations of Andy. Strong and insanely capable. Pointed and direct. But Andy had never been crude to be crude. She kept a kind of moderately polite decorum around them all. Oh she’d banter with them when they all got into it, but she never set out to scandalize. She seemed almost embarrassed whenever she committed some social faux-pas that had escaped her after walking the earth for millennia. 

Booker scrunches up his nose as much as he can and very pointedly says _no,_ through the gag. Quynh laughs at his attempt. “Whyever not? Surely you must have noticed his body.” He attempts to complain once more. She ignores it. “When I first met him, he was sleeping by a fire. I told Andromache, if he didn’t wake up soon I’d wake him with a kiss. He woke up, more’s the pity, and was so shy that for years he blushed whenever I so much as touched him. Two hundred years in, and he _still_ turned his back when we derobed, can you imagine? No. I suppose you can’t. Because you took your eyefull whenever you could didn’t you?”

Something dark and malignant grips his innards. He’d never ogled Nicky. Sometimes they changed in the same room. Sometimes they’d bathe in the same river or communal shower. Sometimes missions called for that kind of thing. But he’d never run his eyes over Nicky’s body in the way Quynh implied. Never fantasized about him like she suggested. Nakedness never mattered much to Booker in the same way it rarely mattered to Andy. He didn’t feel the need to air hump his way to the first bit of exposed skin he saw, and Nicky never inspired lust in him. 

Worse than the suggestion, though, is the thought that despite the natural way he’d always interacted with Nicky, his eyes had been responsible for giving Quynh a view of Nicky that he hadn’t consented to. She’d taken her fill and thought things that Booker hadn’t intended. Hadn’t even considered. Hadn’t thought he’d have to defend against. 

But he _knows_ Nicky. And she does too. Nearly two-hundred years in Nicky’s presence is enough for Booker to confirm: whenever he’s needed to change around Andy, he turns his back and she does the same. Andy never cared around Booker, or even Yusuf for that matter. But she’s polite around Nicky. He doesn’t like it, so she caters to it. Quynh knows this. Knows it more intimately than Booker even. 

He shouts obscenities through the gag, and Quynh ignores them to eat her eggs. “Yusuf, _he_ I tried to fuck a few times, but he was always more interested in Nicolo. I suppose you know how that is.” She takes another bite, chewing it with her mouth open. Her tongue circles her food and pushes it where she wants it. She swallows audibly. The plate is placed on the table. Finally, she walks toward him and removes the gag with a pull that threatens to dislodge his teeth. “Did you try to fuck _Yusuf?”_

“Wouldn’t you have seen it if I did?” Booker grits out. He swings his feet and tries to kick her, but she sidesteps him. Her hand thrusts up into his throat. His airway collapses. He coughs desperately, trying to catch his breath. It doesn’t work. He passes out, and probably dies with his larynx crushed.

He wakes up to Quynh finishing up her eggs, and the gag’s still removed. “You’re rude,” Quynh informs him as she drinks a final sip of water. 

He grunts and tugs at his hands again. Nothing. “Sorry,” he says. “Usually I’m more polite to people who tie me up.” She grins lavasciously at him. It turns his intestines into knots. 

Seeing Quynh smile is disquieting. For two hundred years her face has been contorted in rage, pain, and desolation. Her face twists into the grin and it jerks the skin around her eyes like it doesn’t quite know how to actually form the expression. Her lips form a slash above her chin. He hates it. “There a _reason,_ you’re tying me up?” he asks, not particularly eager to die again, but already thoroughly done with this introduction. Deaths happened when their kind met, but usually it was more of a fair fight. This seemed overkill. In more ways than one. 

“I’m curious how long it will take the others to find you.” 

“Not long at all if I call them and tell them you’re here.” Of that he has no doubts. There are few things their family would lie to one another about. Quynh isn’t one of them. The sheer agony on Andy’s face if it weren’t true would be enough to break Booker’s heart thrice over. He’s already shot her and nearly killed her. He has no intentions of doing any more damage to her fragile, mortal, body. “You gonna greet them the same way?” 

“Worse, I think.” She’s honest about it, at least. Booker twists his hands in a half hearted attempt to get any kind of leverage. His wrists burn and his fingers have long since gone numb. He’d worry more if he didn’t know any damage this did would heal in the long run. It’s still terribly inconvenient and painful. 

“They looked for you,” Booker says. It’s a pitiable defence. After five hundred years, he figures Quynh is entitled to a bit of anger. But it’s not like he was even _born_ when she’d been tossed into the sea. Between the two of them, she got to spy-cam on Nicky’s naked body and he got endless nightmares of her screaming herself to death beneath the waves. He’s got more than enough anger about _that_ to last a lifetime, and if he thought there’d been any purpose or intent behind his family’s actions regarding Quynh, he’d have hated them for completely different reasons than he had before. But he knew this as fact. Andy still grieved after five hundred years without her partner, and neither Nicky or Joe fully recovered from her loss either. “They love you.” 

Quynh seems to be considering what he said. She tilts her head to the side. Her long dark hair cascades across one shoulder. Her slash of a mouth quirks downwards in contemplation. He pulls on his wrists once more, but it’s a useless endeavor. It makes him feel better, though, to do _something._

Before Quynh can come up with an answer, Booker’s cellphone rings. He casts his eyes around the room trying to find it, only slightly surprised when Quynh retrieves it from her pocket. It looks strange in her hands. This, more than anything, warps Booker’s perception of her. She’s no longer the ancient creature trapped in the abyss. She’s a modern woman, now. With a cellphone and a fully utilised understanding of a twenty-first century kitchen. 

She holds the phone up so he can see it. Nicky’s name is flashing across the screen. “Answer it,” he tells her. “He’ll want to hear from you.” She doesn’t answer it. It rings on, and he grunts as he tugs at his writs. “You just...just slide the bar on the bottom—”

“—Do you really think that I made it all the way here with no idea how to work a phone?” she asks him. 

“How the fuck should I know? You were under the ocean last I knew. I didn’t even know you’d come up.” Even as he says it, he’s not so sure. He thinks back, trying to recall the last time he’d dreamed of her. The last time he hadn’t mitigated the nightmares like usual. 

She seems singularly unimpressed with him. “Didn’t you?” she asks as the phone rings on. 

Sweat starts to trickle down his neckline. It pools uncomfortably in the pockets of his joints. Once, only a few months ago, he’d woken up with the worst panic attack he’d had in years. A nightmare that convinced him he’d severed his fingers and had strangled in the dark. He’d called Nicky, certain that he was going to die for good, and Nicky had read him a story until he’d calmed down. Like a parent to their child. Or a brother, desperate to reconnect. “Oh,” he says. “I did see you. I just…” didn’t know he had. 

Finally, the ringing stops. They wait several moments in silence. Then a beep indicates a voicemail, and Quynh taps at the phone to unlock it. When it asks for a password, he hates that she can type it in. He wonders how many times she saw him do it, while she’d been drowning beneath the waves. 

Nicky’s voice fills the room via speakerphone. _“Booker? I’m sorry about yesterday. I needed to complete a job, and couldn’t make it off. I asked Joe to call, but I take it that it didn’t go well. I’m sorry...I did not mean to miss Sunday. Can you call me back? I’m free now. We can still talk about the_ Blind Assassin _if you want?”_ He trails off, then, almost sadly says, _“Bye…”_ and the message ends. 

Even tied to his ceiling with his nerves starting to sting, the message fills Booker with relief he hadn’t even known he’d needed. The clash of emotions twists him up even worse, but he manages to keep his tone level when he tells Quynh, “I wanted to take that.” 

“I’m sure you did.” She settles the phone down beside her. 

“Why didn’t you answer.” 

“I want to know how long it will take them to come.” 

“A lot fucking _faster_ if you talked to them.” 

“For you,” she amends. He blinks at her. He can feel his jaw starting to drop unattractively, but he can’t stop. He has no idea what he’s meant to say to that, and frankly finds it to be more than a little strange considering who’s measuring the time here. 

“I was banished,” he manages to say. “They’re not coming for me.” Quynh looks thoroughly unimpressed with his assessment, but it’s the truth. The whole truth. “Nicky only calls because we do Book Club once a week.” 

She rolls her eyes. Reaching out with delicate fingers, she plucks the gag up from where she’d tossed it, and she brings it back to his face. He snaps his jaw tight when she holds the gag out encouragingly. Shifting her grip, she thrusts her hands out and grabs his genitals in her fist. She squeezes so tight and so swift, he has little time to think before he shouts. The gag goes back between his teeth, suffocating him in an instant. He chokes around it, kicking and squirming as she releases her fist and steps away. “Don’t worry,” she tells him. “I’ll only hurt you until they come.” 

He panics around the gag long enough that eventually he passes out. 

When he wakes up again, the gag’s still in place, his body has worked out how to breathe through his nose, and Quynh is waiting by the door. The sun has fallen, and sweat still drips down Booker’s face and neck. He feels damp all over. Looking down, there’s little doubt why. He’d lost control of his bladder when he’d been unconscious. Piss stains his jeans and sticks between his thighs. He smells so foul and rank that he nearly vomits, catching it just in time to stop himself from choking. He looks up toward Quynh, but she’s not paying any attention to him. She’s just staring at the door. Waiting for it to open. Not believing that it won’t. 

* * *

Nicky calls every day. 

Booker dozes in and out. A puddle of blood, piss, and excrement has formed beneath him. He’s died four more times since the start of this mess, either because his body gave up on him or Quynh finally became intolerant to the smell and felt the fastest way to manage it all was to kill him. Granted, he couldn’t exactly fight her while reviving, so she’d been on to something, but Booker genuinely isn’t interested in catering to her sensitivities. She’d stripped him naked after the second day, and he’d woken up to a bucket beneath his feet so he could drain into it like a sopping rag. 

She doesn’t remove the gag, and so he’s got little recourse except waiting for a miracle (ie: his family _actually_ appearing), or for Quynh to see the light. He’s not entirely sure which one is going to come first, but he’s genuinely curious if Nile’s been dreaming about him. Maybe that’s why Quynh doesn’t look his way that often. Maybe she’s trying to control what Nile can see. 

As Booker dozes in and out, he wakes up to his phone ringing every time. He blinks himself becak into consciousness, stares across the room as Quynh holds it up so he can see who it is, and then they wait for the eventual voicemail. It’s usually some increasingly pathetic apology that sounds more strained as time goes on. 

Sometimes just hearing his brother’s voice is enough to revitalize a spark in Booker to test his restraints, but it never gets him anywhere. Nicky’s kindness isn’t infinite. Eventually, he’s going to stop calling. It’s the only option he has. Booker glances mournfully at his Winnie The Pooh bookshelf and all their collected works. He’s going to miss book club. He really hopes when this is done, Nicky will still read with him. He hopes Nicky will understand. 

He goes back to dozing so he doesn’t have to think about it. He closes his eyes and he rereads the silly stories that Nicky insisted he read. He recites poems that he read not too long ago. He daydreams about his family. He wonders how Nile’s doing. How she’s getting along with the team. She’s a good kid. He hopes she’s doing well...and isn’t dreaming of this. She doesn’t deserve to dream of this. 

Sunday comes.

His body has run out of waste to drain. Quynh seems delighted by that, and removes his bucket. He gets his pants and shirt back too, it only cost him another life so she could dress him in peace. He wakes up with his hands back where they always are, but cozy clothing clinging to him like a favorite blanket. He has half a mind to thank her for it. The other half is more interested in kicking her face the next time she gets close enough for him to try. 

Nicky rings in at the same time their book club would have started. His message this time is even longer than it usually is. He almost sounds desperate, and he apologizes so much that it breaks Booker’s heart. He tries, valiantly to talk through his gag to get Quynh to let him go. Let him call Nicky back. She ignores him, and they wait out the whole of Sunday. No new books. No new conversations. No feel of family.

Booker closes his eyes and tries very hard not to cry. Especially when just as he thinks he’s managed to get his tears under control, there’s a knock at his door. Booker’s head snaps up. Quynh stands, slowly, from where she’d settled herself for the wait. He has no idea if she recognized the sound, but _he_ had. It’s Joe. 

_What the_ fuck _is Joe doing here?_

“Booker?” his brother calls. Quynh’s mouth spreads into her most gruesome smile yet. Booker shakes his head. Panic starts to build in his gut. He jerks on his wrists but nothing happens. He flails, desperate for some kind of play. Some kind of action. “Booker, I know you’re in there.” He is. He is, and he has never wanted to see Joe _less_ than this very moment. “Booker, look...can you open up? I don’t want to have this conversation in your hall.” 

Quynh grabs something. Booker can’t quite tell what it is, but it’s long and cylindrical and it very well could be a fire poker that came with the flat and that he sometimes uses to squish spiders with. She’s shifting about, getting to the wall beside the door. Booker shakes his head. He shakes it faster and faster. He screams against his gag, but it barely makes a sound. He’s too dehydrated to make noise properly, and she seems to have no intentions on making this easier for any of them. 

“Look…” Joe leans against the door. Booker can hear how his body sags against it. “Look I messed up okay? I’m sorry. I came to apologize. Nicky’s pissed off, and Nile’s throwing a fit, and even Andy’s got it in her head that I’ve fucked this all up. And I know that this reading thing meant a lot to you, and I know with this exile shit’s weird right now. But like, come on. Open the door. I don’t know when you’re going to see me actually groveling for forgiveness again, but I’m here aren’t I?” 

He is. He is, and Booker wishes he’d been more self-centered. Wishes he’d literally just told Nicky to grow up and leave Booker alone. He can barely believe the whole team had jumped on his case for _one_ bad phone-call, but in retrospect, Booker has fallen off the face of the earth. Even if Copley looked into him, all he’d have found is that Booker’s phone has stayed in his flat and Booker has never left it after coming home slashed one evening. 

Maybe Copley saw Quynh entering the flat, though. Maybe that’s enough of something to _matter_. Booker’s eyes are burning. Mucus starts to stream from his nose. He sniffs loudly and tries again to free himself. The bind is too tight and it’s hopeless. “Fuck it,” Joe says, and Booker nearly sags in relief. “I tried being nice.” Yes. He did. And now he can leave. Now he can—

Throw his shoulder into the door and knock it clean off the frame, stumbling into the flat like a bull. He takes three steps to steady himself, then he looks up with a shit-eating grin that used to amuse Booker endlessly prior to their missions. Joe’s brown eyes land on Booker, and the grin freezes on his face. Booker tries, valiantly to provide some kind of warning, but by this point it’s far too late. 

With all the miming and gagged-shouting that Booker can muster, it only has enough of an effect for Joe to half turn on his heel. He _maybe_ caught a glimpse of Quynh before she slams the iron bar against his head. But frankly, even if he had, he had no chance of stopping it. He collapses in a heap and lays perfectly still. 

Quynh’s slashing smile grows on her face. She looks more delighted than she had in the entire time since she first took Booker captive. She twirls the iron in her hand, spins on her heel, and goes to inspect the damage on the door. Booker watches his brother, knowing full well that he’s not going to wake up in time to stop Quynh from tying him up too. 

She’s crushed the side of his skull. Bone, blood, and viscera congeal in a perfect divot. Joe’s eyes are wide open, but he’s not moving. She killed him in one shot and it’s going to take at least a few minutes before Joe can piece himself back together again. 

By the time Booker starts to see the injury pulling inwards, reshaping into a proper skull, the door is closed and held shut with a chair. Another chair has been procured, and Quynh hoists Joe up and into it while his head still lolls about uselessly. She wraps his hands in fabric, then ties the cloth tightly around the arms of the chair. His legs go next. Another wrap secures his torso to the back of the chair so he can’t use any leverage to pull out the knots. 

He’s blinking again when she finally steps back. Blinking and awkwardly tilting his head around until he sees Booker dangling not two metres away. “What...the fuck?” he enunciates carefully. Booker juts his chin toward Quynh, and Joe turns to look. He blinks slowly, still seeming to be pulling himself back together. 

He looks at Quynh, and she grins that horrid grin of hers right back. “Hello, Yusuf,” she says in a language no one but their family even speaks anymore. “Did you miss me?” And then she kisses him right on the mouth. 

Joe doesn’t move a muscle. He doesn’t pull away, doesn’t try to test his binds. He just sits there, still as stone, staring at her face as it came closer and closer. When she pulls back, his tongue darts out as if to confirm that something really _had_ been there. “Quynh?” he breathes out, dumb in his shock. 

“Booker said you would not come for him,” she informs. Joe’s eyes slant toward Booker, but it’s a half look, a kind of quick glance in the side mirror before changing lanes. He’s already committed to staring at Quynh, and he resumes with such devotion that Booker can’t even fully blame him. Joe’s enraptured by her very appearance. He hasn’t even fully grasped the fact he’s been tied down. He’s just staring at her like she hung the moon. 

“You’re here,” he whispers. “God, Andromache. Andromache needs to know. Why didn’t you call?” He looks back at Booker, this time actually taking in what he saw. “Why...did you tie him to the ceiling?” 

Quynh laughs. It jingles like a delicate bell. “I tied you up too, or did you not notice?” Joe blinks at her so stupidly, Booker genuinely believes he had not noticed. 

“Have you been here all week? Since Nicolo tried to call?” Andromache. Nicolo. Joe pulls out their old names like he’d never left them behind. Like he hadn’t embraced modernity in the years since they left Quynh to the ocean’s embrace. Sometimes, Nicky will call Joe ‘Yusuf’ when he’s feeling particularly impassioned or he is remembering something from hundreds of years past, but their names rarely came out in full. Only when things mattered most. Booker supposes things matter the most at the moment. 

“Yes,” Quynh says. She walks by him and into the bedroom. Joe attempts to crane his neck to follow her motions, but can’t. He swivels back to face front, taking in Booker’s diminished state. His face shifts about, emotions Booker can’t even begin to start naming begin to take shape on Joe’s face. His nose scrunches. His brows narrow. His lips pull down into the deepest frown Booker’s ever seen him get when Nicky wasn’t involved. 

He raises his voice. He asks, “What have you done to Booker?” 

“Nothing much,” she calls back. Something heavy starts to slide against the floorboards. Booker squints his eyes to see if he can track it. It’s nothing he’s seen before. Perhaps he’d been dead when she brought it in. It looks like a large metal rectangle, and it’s already set up on dollies so she can move it more easily. 

The closer it comes, the more that rectangle appears to be something less innocent. As if anything that had happened since Quynh first arrived could be considered _innocent_. Booker makes a noise behind his gag. He kicks his feet. He jerks at his hands. But still Quynh moves forward, until Joe can see it too. 

“I’d thought _Nicky_ would be the one who’d come,” she admits. “He did call so much.” 

“Quynh?” Joe asks slowly. 

“How long did you search for me?” she asks back. 

“Decades.” It’s an answer Booker knew by heart. “We died trying to find you,” Joe continues, with a story Booker _didn’t_ know nearly as well. “Over and over again. At first, we couldn’t reach the bottom. But then, we couldn’t find you once we found a way. There was too much to search. Storms chased us. We-we nearly lost each other all to the sea more than once. And when all the sailors on that ship died, and we had no leads or means to get to you...Quynh, stopping was the hardest choice we made.” 

She nods as he speaks. She almost looks sympathetic to his plight. “So you stopped when the people who did that to me died?” 

“I don’t understand.” 

“Why did you stop, Yusuf?” Booker stares at the rectangle. It’s not just a rectangle. It’s a box. A big metal box. There are no eyes or mouth holes, but it doesn’t matter. Booker’s spent hundreds of years trapped in Quynh’s head, haunted by her hatred. He screams against the gag. He tugs his hands as hard as he can. He’s dizzy with the effort. Joe’s eyes flick to the box and then back. He swallows thickly, resolute. 

“We were never going to find you,” Joe says. 

She nods again, that agonizing nod of apparent acceptance. “Do you think Nicolo would stop looking for you?” 

Booker’s never seen sorrow on Joe’s face. Not like this. Not so openly broken hearted. Joe’s eyes are wet. His blood stained face peers up at its only hope, and its certain peril. Joe looks up at Quynh, and he doesn’t beg. He doesn’t plead. He doesn’t do any of the things Booker might have had their roles been reversed. He looks up at her, and he says: “What do you really want, Quynh?” 

“Validity,” she answers. Then, she breaks his neck. Booker screams. He jerks anxiously on the binds around his wrists. He pulls and pulls and pulls, but nothing happens. Just as nothing had happened all the other times he pulled. He screams and doesn’t stop screaming as Quynh unties Joe from the chair. She opens the box, and drags Joe’s limp body into it. She closes the box and locks it. “If it makes you feel better,” Quynh says, “If it took them a week to check in on you, it’ll take Nicolo far less time to check in on Yusuf. You’ll be free soon.” 

It doesn’t make him feel better at all. He screams and pulls as hard as he can. He tries desperately to get free, but she’s wheeling the box out. She leaves, and his busted door hangs limply on its hinges without the chair to hold it upright. Booker screams until he runs out of breath. He cries until he runs out of tears. He chokes until he passes out. 

And when he finally wakes up again, it’s to Nicky’s face only centimeters away. He’s cupping Booker’s cheeks between his palms and talking slowly in the way he always talks to someone when they’re hurt. Something cuts Booker’s hands down and he collapses against his brother as his weight is finally allowed to fall. Nicky catches him against his chest, one hand at the back of his neck. The gag’s been removed, and Booker feels his body shaking violently in Nicky’s arms. “Joe—” he gets out. 

He tries to manage his feet, but they’re useless beneath him. Nicky drags him to a chair and gently rests him into it. Nile and Andy are just behind him, both looking so concerned that Booker nearly sobs in relief. Maybe they still have time. “She-she has Joe,” he rasps. Nicky blinks at him, then blinks again. 

Slowly, he says: “Who has Joe?” 

Nonsensically, Booker looks to Nile. Her brows furrow as Nicky and Andy follow his gaze. Nile holds her hands up as if to deny it, but then alarm takes refusal’s place. “Oh my God.” Her hands clasp around her mouth. So. She _had_ seen something. 

“Nile?” Andy asks. It isn’t gentle. It’s commanding. Firm. She wants an answer. Booker wishes there’s a better answer to give her. 

“It’s...is it?” Nile asks Booker, and he finds himself the center of attention once more. 

“Quynh,” he says. “Quynh took Joe. Put him in a...a metal coffin. I don’t know where she went.” Nicky’s fingers go tight around Booker’s shoulder and knee. All the color has drained from his face. All his concern and worry replaced with frightening blankness. 

He glances toward the ceiling where Booker had hung for over a week. Toward the door that Joe had burst through. The chair still lined with the bonds that temporarily held his lover hostage. Then finally, they rest on Booker’s face. Nile lets out a sob behind him. She keeps repeating that she should have understood. That she should have known. Andy is frozen in place, lips repeating the name over and over like she couldn’t quite understand it’s meaning. 

Then, Nicky stands. He walks out the door. And he doesn't look back.


	2. Chapter 2

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Key Series References from The Briar Patch and What Could Have Been.

Copley pulls every security camera in a twelve block radius around Booker’s apartment that has a view of the street. He looks through each one with the single minded determination of a new CIA recruit. Once he finds Quynh, he tracks her movements to an airfield where she used Booker’s connections to organize a flight out of the country. Even if he hadn’t told her anything himself, even if it wasn’t what he’d wanted, Booker feels the weight of his betrayal growing by the second. He pukes up the soup that Andy scrounged up for him after Nicky took off, and can’t bring himself to miss it. 

“Did she have a box with her?” Andy asks as Nile rubs Booker’s back. 

“Yes.” Then, he gets quiet. Quiet enough for Nile to turn and look over her shoulder to ask.

“What is it?” 

“She had... _several_ boxes with her.” Copley shows them his screen. There are three identical metal boxes all lined up one right next to the other. They board the plane with Quynh smiling at the security camera in the hanger before she boards. 

Andy’s breath catches in her throat and Booker wishes he could just curl up and die. Let that be the end of it. There’s no avoiding the pain radiating off of Andy. She’s crushing under the weight of Quynh’s reality and if Booker hadn’t spent the past week getting intimately familiar with who Quynh is now, he might have something kind to say to Andy about it. He doesn’t, so he keeps his mouth shut and tries not to lose any more soup to the toilet. 

“How’s she paying for any of this?” Nile asks. 

“Me,” he replies. “It’s all through me.” Copley asks him about his banking information, and Booker gives it to him. It doesn’t matter at this point. Nothing does. With the accounts loaded, Booker’s suspicion is merely confirmed. Quynh’s _siphoning_ cash from Booker’s accounts. “Do they say where she’s going?” he asks, praying for some kind of miracle. 

Copley says, “Let me see,” and starts typing away. Booker presses the heels of his palms to his eyes. His fingers tangle in his hair. He tries to breathe in slow breaths, but every few seconds his efforts are thwarted. Nicky’s hands on his shoulder and knee when the realization struck him are burned into Booker’s senses. The look on Nicky’s face as the true impact of what Quynh may have done has scarred the interior of Booker’s brain. Every synapse is seared with the image of Nicky’s eyes. 

Nicky had been the only member of his family he’d spoken to during his six months of exile. The only one who had reached out time and time again, pushing through all the mess of his emotions and his self-destruction just to have a conversation with him. And because of _him,_ for the _second_ time, Nicky’s going through the worst fate their kind could experience.

Nile shifts around so she’s kneeling in front of Booker. Her hands grip his shoulders. “It’s not your fault,” she says. 

“It’s my money. My memories.” 

“She could just as easily get things from me,” Nile says. Booker’s head snaps up. Nile’s eyes widen. She looks to Andy in a panic. “I can’t be here while you do this.” 

Copley’s fingers hesitate over the keyboard. He slants a glance toward Nile, then back to Andy. Andy hasn’t said much of anything since this mess started, but now she closes her eyes. She takes a deep breath, and nods. “Go see if you can find Nicky,” she says. Nile casts one last regretful look at Booker, squeezes his shoulders again in a vague approximation of comfort, then leaves. 

Booker watches her go. He feels hollowed out. Emptied of anything good or worthwhile. Nausea rolls about in his stomach. Forcing himself to meet Andy’s eyes, he says: “I’m sorry, boss.”

“It’s not your fault,” Andy repeats. It’s not that she doesn’t sound certain, rather it’s that she sounds just as exhausted as he feels. Finally, she lets herself crumple into a chair. She mimics Booker’s pose. Elbows on her knees, hands in her hair. Copley starts typing again. None of them speak. 

* * *

Nile is starting to think Paris is just unlucky. She’s been here twice, and both times someone’s been kidnapped. _The same_ someone actually, and Nile’s steadfastly praying that Nicky hasn’t managed to join Joe in the worst way possible. Still. Paris must be doomed. She’s striking it off her list of places to come back to. It’s genuinely not worth all this stress. 

She doubles back to Booker’s apartment, on the off chance that Nicky had returned to scope out the scene of the crime. It’s not far from their safe house, but it’s far enough that Nile feels the late summer evening chill start to fill the air. She zips up her jacket and walks a bit faster, casting her eyes in all directions for anything even slightly suspicious. 

It’s for naught, though. When she gets to the apartment, it’s void of life. Bloodstains and remnants of kidnapping aside, there’s nothing interesting here. Nile checks every room just in case. She tries to see if there’s anything out of the ordinary, but there’s nothing. Nothing except that Winnie the Pooh bookcase that Booker had bought a few weeks back. The one she saw in a dream a few days ago, and put up to a vague memory from the picture Nicky had shown her. It hadn’t been. She’d seen it because Quynh had seen it. Nile stands where Quynh once stood, taking in the sight of the bookcase and all its treasured volumes. They mirror the books Nile’s been watching Nicky read. But like a double exposed picture, it all seems streaked and wrong. Booker had been coming back to life here. And now...now she doesn’t know what they’re going to do. 

Taking a deep breath, Nile leaves. There’s nothing left she can do here, and Nicky’s had a hell of a head start. 

Neither Andy or Booker were surprised when Nicky bolted. She’d asked, as they’d bundled to Copley’s, where he might go, but neither knew for sure. He could be anywhere. He could be doing anything. Maybe he could even track Joe down with the power of his love and they’d be back home together, laughing and in each other’s arms where they belong. 

Maybe not.

Nile tries to think. Where would Nicky _go?_ It’s not like they had any leads. It’s not like there was a tire trail that they could follow. So he hadn’t gone to chase after Quynh. Couldn’t have. He’d have the same information that Copley would have, and probably a bit slower at that. Nicky isn’t _bad_ at computers, but he doesn’t have the access Copley does. It’d take him longer to track Quynh without Copley’s resources. And he’s smart enough to know that. 

“I’ve just lost my husband,” Nile says to herself, tapping her fingers on the wheel of the rental car. “I need to be alone. But I want...something that reminds me of...” She bites her lip and then pulls out her phone. She types _Louis Charles grave_ into her search bar, and the Basilica of Saint-Denis pulls up. Swallowing, she puts it into google maps, and sets the GPS in motion. It’s a bit of a walk, but with enough determination, Nicky could make it. He’s had hours. 

The abbey will be closed. And it might not even be logical. As far as she knows, Louis-Charles isn’t actually buried there. Google says just his heart, but Nile wonders what is actually in that tomb. Their son is far far away. Buried next to a sweet dog who had been his constant companion in the four years of life he’d had with two men who wanted nothing more than his happiness. Nile doesn’t let herself doubt. Paris is a huge city, and this is just one option. If he’s not at the Basilica then she’ll look elsewhere. He’ll turn up. One way or another, he’ll turn up. 

Half an hour later, she finally reaches the Basilica. It’s lit up by street lamps. The interior is dark. She licks her lips and tries the door. It opens. Peering into the darkness, she tries to chase away the thought that she’s trespassing. She genuflects on instinct when she crosses the threshold, and shivers in the gloom. Pulling her jacket even tighter around her, Nile tiptoes through the darkness. 

She keeps to one side of the abbey, ducking into alcoves when she has a chance. She can’t hear any movement, but even the stained glass feels judgmental right now. As she slips along the tombs of buried kings, Nile starts tracking names and dates. She knows she’s getting closer. When she reaches the tomb of Louis XVI, she finally sees something move in the darkness. A shadow pressed to the wall. Carefully, she steps closer. The moon shines in through one of the stained glass windows. Relief floods her veins. Nicky’s there. He’s curled up as close to the wall as he can get, but he’s there. 

Nile glances at the wall he’s leaning against. It’s been engraved. And inside the wall is a carefully constructed viewing box for a crystal urn holding an embalmed heart. “It’s his,” Nicky whispers before Nile could even ask. “Kings hearts are preserved. He was a king. When he gave Louis-Charles to us, Dr. Pelletan asked that if he not survive, we give him Louis-Charles’s heart so he could try to have him buried with his parents.”

“Who did it?” she asked. Morbidly curious and horrified in one. She hoped it wasn’t one of them. She knows it was. 

“We did it together. After he died. It was all we could do. He’d have wanted it, though. To be here with his mother.”

Nile sits down. Her shoulder brushes against his. He seems small, like this. Huddled against a stone wall with his adopted son’s heart only inches away. “Quynh might know about this...because of me,” she whispers. 

“Oh.” He doesn’t say anything else. She wishes it had been more of a response, but she can’t tell what he intends with that. Can’t tell what’s on his mind. She bites her lip. 

“Copley’s looking for Quynh and Joe. We’ll find him.” Nicky’s head leans closer to the heart. His eyes shut. He doesn’t seem to be breathing, and Nile has no idea what she’s meant to do. She’s never seen him like this. Never been the one in charge of helping him when he was down. That was always Joe. Nicky and Joe, Joe and Nicky, they’re a unit. They’re not meant to be separated. Even now, Nile eyes half skitter when she looks at Nicky. Like there’s something missing that’s meant to be there. Like he isn’t a complete picture without his other half. 

This past week, Nicky’s been anxious. Pacing around their safe houses with such a hair-trigger temper that Nile avoided him more than anything else. He and Joe argued with each other in all kinds of different languages as Andy sighed progressively louder. Finally, after one too many slammed doors and unanswered phone calls, Joe relented. _I’ll go apologize to Booker, happy?_ He’d spat in Nicky’s face. 

_Thrilled,_ Nicky spat back. 

And then _Joe_ stopped answering Nicky’s phone calls. Nile squeezes her hands into fists. She wraps her arms around her chest and leans her head against Nicky’s shoulder forming a chain leading up to Louis-Charles’ reliquary. 

“He loves you,” Nile says. 

Nicky makes a sound. It’s almost a laugh, but it’s too depressing to possibly be filled with anything close to humor. He says, “I know.”

“And that fight, it’s not your fault—”

“—Nile. I know.” 

_Well_ I _don’t know,_ Nile wants to say. _I don’t know why you’re here. Why you left. Why you’re not trying to help Copley find Joe._

“We _have_ fought before,” Nicky tells her. It lacks his usual smile or even a sense of amusement. She almost can hear the echo of a comment. _We killed each other many times…_ but no such echo is spoken aloud. “We are not always in tandem. It’s healthy.”

“Why come here?” she asks. 

Spread out before them are the black stone tombs of Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette. There’s no other sound in the whole Basilica, save their breathing. Nile shivers against Nicky’s side, but he doesn’t move to wrap an arm around her as he might have done. He just sits there, leaning against the wall. Quiet and still. “Five hundred years,” he whispers into the darkness. “We lost her for five hundred years.” 

Nile doesn’t know that kind of pain. That kind of loss. She had friends before all of this. She watched some of her comrades die in Afghanistan. She lost her father. But somehow it feels different. Quynh had been his family for _five hundred years_. And now, he sits in an abbey even younger than Quynh. Time feels so distorted now. Nile doesn’t know what to say. 

“Joe...Joe’s going to be fine, Nicky. You know him, he’s—”

“—In your nightmares of Quynh, did you ever once feel like she would forgive anyone?” Nile flinches. She digs her head against his shoulder. She wishes she knew what to say. Optimism isn’t going to get them out of this. It isn’t going to fix everything. 

Neither is lying. Nile admits, “She felt like pure rage,” and Nicky nods against the stone. 

“Do you want to know why we stopped looking?” 

“Nicky, she might hear this.”

“Let her. Do you want to know why?” 

“Why?” 

“I fell overboard. Joe dove in after me. We left Andy on a ship, to watch us disappear beneath the waves. I don’t know how we weren’t separated, so often I could feel my body sinking, but Joe kept me up. And when he needed to rest, I did the same for him. We found some driftwood and managed to stay together until a ship saw us and brought us back to shore. We found Andy at the house we’d been staying in during our search almost four months later. She said she wouldn’t lose us too. So we stopped looking.”

Nile wishes, suddenly, that she was back home in Chicago. Her mom could make the best hot chocolate, and whenever things were bad—that cup of cocoa always made her feel like things could be right again. She wishes she could just give Nicky some now. Some hot chocolate and a promise that he could believe things would be better. She wishes things were more simple. 

“It wasn’t your fault,” she tells him. 

“No. But we didn’t help.” Closing his eyes, Nicky snuggles in closer to the wall. He takes a few deep breaths, like he’s about to go to sleep right then and there. But eventually he opens his eyes again. He stares out into the darkness of the abbey. “She can’t kill Andy.” He says. “Not if she doesn’t want Andy to die permanently. Joe and I are the only ones left to punish.” 

“She punished Booker a lot for someone who had nothing to do with it,” Nile counters. 

“That isn’t Quynh’s version of punishment,” Nicky whispers back. 

He says it with such certainty that Nile wishes she hadn’t opened her mouth. She isn’t even sure if she wants to know. She swallows thickly. “What was she like?” she asks. He’s told her about Quynh before, back when she had her first nightmare. But it seems wholly inadequate now. In the face of this threat. 

Nicky takes his time in answering. He shifts a little, seemingly getting more comfortable. Eventually, he says: “Cunning. Smart. Ruthless. She taught Yusuf—Joe—and I to fight by carving her lover to pieces.” 

“Andy?” 

“Lykon. He’s the...one who died.” 

Horror filled Nile’s heart. “Did she—”

“—No. There was an ambush. He was cut in the side, here,” he motions on his body. “Quynh and Andy mourned him for centuries. He was a part of them. Their perfect trinity.” He pauses, then goes on. “She’s shameless. Perceptive. Teasing.”

“Not kind?” It had been a fool’s hope, perhaps. Nicky shakes his head. 

“She doesn’t have Andy’s tender heart. She sees something, she takes it. She wants something, she makes it hers. She hates something, she destroys it. In a way, she’s very simple to understand. She is desire oriented. Know her desires, and you know her.” 

“So what would she want with Joe?” 

“Restitution,” Nicky replies. His head tilts a little, then he lifts one finger to his lips. _Quiet._ Nile leans forward. She can hear footsteps. They’re steady and certain. Well used to navigating this space. Tucked into the shadows of Louis-Charles’ memorial, they are near invisible to the clergyman making his way through the line of pews. The man disappears into the rectory at the back of the abbey, and Nile releases a breath she hadn’t realized she’d been holding. “We should go,” Nicky whispers. 

“Are you sure?” 

“Copley will have found something by now.” 

_Ah._ He’d expected them to start the search without him. And still, Nile’s struggling to understand why here? Why now? Why like this?

Nicky holds out his hand and helps her stand. They walk silently back toward the door and carefully slip out onto the street. The moon’s high over head, and it lights up the town square. They descend the steps leading out to the main walkway, and from there start meandering toward Nile’s rental. 

Almost as soon as they get in the car, Nile’s phone rings. She answers it. It’s Andy. “Did you find Nicky?” Andy asks. 

“Yeah, we just got in the car.” 

“Get back here. We’ve got a lead.” 

“Don’t want us to meet you anywhere?” 

“No, it’s faster if you come to us.” Nile confirms, and ends the call. She relays the message and Nicky sags against the car door. 

“Why’d you run out?” Nile asks as she pulls onto the road heading back south to the main parts of Paris. 

“The night you talked to your mother and brother at the Briar Patch, I made Joe a promise I didn’t want to keep.” She waits, flicking her directional on and casually lifting the car up to the speed limit. “If one of us is gone, the other keeps going. No matter what.” 

“Okay...but why come here?” 

He seems to fold into himself, layer after layer, until he’s little more than a sweatshirt and jeans held up only by a skeletal frame. “A reminder for why I made the promise.” 

“For Louis-Charles?” 

“No.” Nicky closes his eyes. He doesn’t speak for the rest of the trip, no matter how many questions she asks. 

* * *

Quynh’s plane landed in Bristol. There, the three boxes separated. One boarded a plane heading east. Another boarded a plane returning south. A third was brought to a freight ship that already set out to sea. Copley calls in a few contacts and gets someone on the horn to the freighter. They’ve stalled the ship in British waters, and the HM Coastguard is on scene already. 

It takes time to examine each item on the ship, but they’re well underway when Nicky and Nile return to the safehouse. Andy and Booker are watching the screen with rapt attention as a Coastguard member live streams their progress. Nile excuses herself to sit in the hall, wringing her hands as she waits and hoping that nothing she’s learned already could possibly be transmitted to Quynh yet. 

An hour passes before finally Booker shouts. “That’s it. That’s it!” he’s pointing desperately at the screen, and a black box identical to the ones in Quynh’s hanger appears. Copley radios in to the Coastguardsman, and the box is removed from the storage container it’d been placed in. A heavy metal lock seals it shut, but a pair of thick cutters snap through it efficiently enough. 

From the gap in the doorway, Nile can just see Nicky leaning forward, desperation clear. The box is opened.

But it’s empty. 

Joe’s not inside. 

“It must be one of the other two then,” Copley says. He starts thanking his contacts and tidying up the remains of the busted op. Tears prick at Nile’s eyes. She wipes at them as hard as she can, desperate to not cry where Nicky could see her. 

It doesn’t seem to really make much of a difference in the long run. 

Nicky isn’t looking at anyone. “Can I have a computer?” he asks. Copley passes him one. “Tell me where we are.” Andy starts catching him up to speed, and Nile presses her hands over her ears. She can’t listen. Can’t be here. 

“I’m going to go,” She shouts, and they spare her a long, terribly sad look, but they nod. And she leaves. 

She gets herself a hotel, lays down on the bed, and when she finally lets herself cry it all out, she’s eternally grateful that no one is around to see her.

* * *

Thousands of miles away, in the frigid black darkness of a metal box in a plane’s cargo hold, Joe lies awake. He runs his fingers along every wall and barrier in his coffin. Then he takes a deep breath, and starts to punch.


	3. Chapter 3

_ Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.  _

* * *

Booker passes out around the witching hour. He crumples over the desk he’d been working at, papers smooshing under his arm as it forms a makeshift pillow beneath his head. Copley sets no less than three alerts on his computer, then programs an alarm for the morning. He says “I can’t be at my best if I don’t get a few hours,” and commandeers one of the beds in the safehouse. It leaves Andy to stand by to watch Nicky work. 

And Nicky works. 

He commits himself to not tracking the boxes, but Quynh herself. Whenever she gets on or off a plane, he’s following her. He’s marking down her location, her itinerary. He’s following her money from Booker’s accounts, and he’s slowly spinning webs around where she can and cannot go. He’s trying to lock her into place long enough for the rest of them to board a flight and catch up to her. 

All the while, Copley’s playing a shell game with Quynh and the boxes. It seems every time one boards a plane or ship, it does so with two identical copies. They all flitter off into the wind. Until there are multiple boxes in multiple states of seizure at any given moment. Copley wields his resources like a mad man, and box after box gets opened. They’re all empty. 

Andy watched Copley’s progress with as much patience as she could muster, but by the fourth time Nicky froze in anticipation as a lock was smashed off a metal coffin, only to reveal nothing within, that patience began to waiver. She goes to get food, aiming for speed and comfort if nothing else. Nicky, almost predictably, doesn’t eat a bite. 

“You don’t need it to survive,” Andy says, when it’s just the two of them still awake in the early hours of the morning, “But you need it to  _ live.”  _

Nicky’s eyes haven’t moved from the security camera he’s monitoring. He’s sitting rigid and still, statuesque in the evening. Andy presses a hand to his shoulder and squeezes it. “Nicolo…” 

“After Merrick, I promised Joe I’d keep going, if he were taken from me,” Nicky says in the dialect he was born learning. He’s the only one of them that still uses his native tongue with any degree of regularity. His accent never became muddled as the years went by. It stayed with him, like a badge of honor. A remembrance of home. “You’re dying and Nile needs us. He made me promise I’d be there for her. So she wouldn’t be alone.” 

His fingers are trembling on his keyboard. He still can’t look at her. Andy kneels at his side. She pauses the footage he’s watching, then goes to cup his cheek with the palm of her hand. He doesn’t turn easily, but he doesn’t truly fight her as she guides his face toward hers. “We’ll find Quynh,” Andy replies in the same language. “We will. We’ll find her, and we’ll set this right.” 

Nicky doesn’t do her the discourtesy of laughing in the face of her optimism. She doesn’t even call her out on the incredulity of her statement. Finding Quynh has never been their team’s strong suit. He does glance away though, back toward the computer monitor, resting frozen on a barren city street. “Besides, I’m not leaving any of you until I know you can take care of yourselves.” It’s an attempt at humor. An attempt to see him smile. He doesn’t take the bait. He sits still against her palm. The skin under his eyes sags with exhaustion, his lips dangle like a doll with no strings. The frown isn’t purposeful, merely instinctual. A resting face of despair. 

Andy’s hand shifts. It slides down and around Nicky’s neck. She squeezes it and pulls him toward her. He goes. His eyes close as he settles against the crook of her neck. His hands squeeze against her shirt. It’s not a proper hug. Not really. He’s not returning it so much as bracing himself against her. Still, she wraps an arm around his back and lets her fingers run through his hair. Over and over.

They used to sit like this in reverse. When she still went by Andromache and he still introduced himself as Nicolo. When Quynh had just been taken from her, and she’d been made with grief, Nicky pulled her to his chest and held her there as she tried to banish her pain. At night, she lay cradled in his arms. The weight of them was both familiar and wrong. They weren’t  _ Quynh’s  _ arms. She didn’t dare pull away. 

Every so often, throughout the hundreds of years that past since Quynh had been stolen from her, the pain grew to a point that Andromache the Scythian didn’t know if she could handle it on her own. Not after Lykon. It was too much. And Nicky would be there. Always. Always with his arms open and his heart on his sleeve. She’d collapse into his chest and he’d hold her steady. A rocky promontory who never let her lose herself to the sea. 

She knew then, just as she knows now, that she would have always returned the favor. But she never wanted to. She never wanted Nicky to need her like this. To cling to her in hopes that she could provide the comfort that he gave so naturally. This isn’t her job. Her job is to be there if he needs to vent, not be the sole foundation upon which he builds his psyche. 

It hadn’t been Nicky’s job either, but in some ways Nicky had always been built of sterner stuff than she. She is responsible for defending their bodies. Nicky’s always been there to defend their hearts. Worse yet. She’s  _ dying.  _ One way or another, if they don’t find Joe, she’s going to leave him behind at his lowest point, and she  _ can’t.  _ Not now. Not like this. 

Her arm tightens around his back. She kisses his hair. “We’re going to find them,” she tells him. “I promise.”

“I need to get back to it,” he says. It sounds like him. It’s his voice. But it’s not the gentle hum that filled her days for nearly a millennium. It’s lost so much of it’s flavor. It’s strength. She lets him pull back and turn to the laptop. His trembling fingers return to the keyboard and start the video again. 

The food sits at his side growing cold, and Andy wishes she knew what to say. 

For centuries, finding Quynh has been Andy’s soul desire. If there was one thing that could pull her from the mire of her thoughts, it was Quynh. On a base level, she and Booker always connected to one another because of that. He wanted his wife more than anything, and so did she. They drank through their grief, they lived through their sorrows, but Booker couldn’t find any other reason to push forward: and she could. It’s the only thing that separated them in the end. 

She hasn’t even tried to consider what the fallout from all of this is going to be. If the ideal scenario comes to pass: Quynh is living with them happily and Joe is back at Nicky’s side where he belongs,  _ where does that leave Booker?  _ It’s hardly fair to try to get him to shack up with Nile, though for symmetry’s purpose alone it would be a blessing. It’s a stray thought made of desperation and nothing more. She kicks this ball down the road. There may be no ideal scenario at all when they’re done. 

Nicky’s been nice enough not to call her out on it. Booker hasn’t seen past his guilt to consider it. Nile is just too young. But Nicky knows her and knows Quynh, and Andy knows that he’s already guessed an ending that Andy’s been trying to avoid. 

If it all comes down to a fight. If the choice is Quynh or Joe. Which side is Andy on? 

She’s been mother, sister, and dearest companion to Nicky, Joe, Booker, and Nile. But the grand total of time between them all individually added together is only a fraction of the time she’s spent with Quynh. 

Empires rose and fell during her life with Quynh. Thinking about her still thrills Andy to the deepest part of her soul. She thinks of Quynh and she wants nothing more than to weep at the altar of Quynh’s ethos, begging forgiveness for not being the one to find her after all these years. And if Quynh wanted her life, she’d give it. She’d give it willingly. But if Quynh wanted to  _ stay _ ...Andy would like nothing more than to live the last few years she has left in the arms of a woman who made her feel like eternity was worth living. 

Nicky and Joe...or Quynh?

Andy scans over Nicky’s beloved face. His slender frame. His hands. She always thought of him and Joe as her and Quynh come again. Soulmates destined to find one another. A love-story written in the stars. For years, Andy thought that there’d be nothing in this life that could possibly keep her from defending them until her last breath. They were better than she and Quynh ever could have been. They inherited all of Quynh’s strength, all of Lykon’s kindness, all of her knowledge. 

And with that knowledge came an understanding. 

“I’ll forgive you,” Nicky whispers into the pre-dawn light. Andy’s jaw clenches. They’d started speaking in Nicky’s first tongue earlier, but this one...this one’s  _ hers.  _ The one she taught him during quiet nights alone, sharing new foods and delicacies while Joe and Quynh were off hunting together. Nicky zooms the video he’s watching in a bit more and takes a note down on a pad kept by his right hand. He says, “When it happens...I’ll forgive you.” 

“Nicky…”

Finally, he looks up to meet her eyes of his own volition. “Will you forgive me?” 

She hates that when she asks, “What are you going to do, Nicky?” it comes out accusatory. As if the lines have already been drawn and now it’s just a matter of the inevitable crossing. Nicky and Joe against Andy and Quynh, with Booker and Nile caught in the crossfire. 

“Bring him home,” Nicky says.

“And after?” 

“Depends on Quynh.” 

_ That, _ Andy thinks, _ is what I'm afraid of.  _

Copley’s computer beeps. They turn to look at it, waiting for some sort of sign on how to proceed. It doesn’t matter, the sound wakes up their point-man and he rolls out of bed to rush to the device. A few clicks of a button later and he lets out a whoop of relief. “I have her. She’s got a box with her too.”

“Where?” 

“Riesa, Germany.” 

Nicky huffs a laugh. Of course. It’s where they arranged to meet Booker all those years ago. And Quynh is nothing if not poetic. 

They wake up Booker as Copley arranges a flight. For this run, Nile will stay behind. Andy wonders if she’s dreaming of Quynh right now. She hopes if she does, she sees Joe. 

She hopes he’s all right. 

She’d hate what she’d need to do if he wasn’t. 

* * *

_ Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.  _

* * *

In 1989 the Riesan steel works were shut down. Riesa lost forty percent of its population in the years that followed. Abandoned warehouses, factories, and storerooms were left like wasp nests around the city. Eyesores too cumbersome to bother with, and eventually too dangerous to do much else with. Every so often a wealthy benefactor would come, buy up some property and try to rebuild something in its place. They even retrofitted the old factories into something new. But it wasn’t all of them. It wasn’t enough. 

Copley tells them he’s tracked Quynh to Riesa, and once they arrive he’s narrowed it down to an old factory settled close to the Elbe River. Andy doesn’t know how to arm herself for this mission. She stares down at the usual supplies Copley arranges for them, and can’t seem to remember the best way to do anything. She thinks about taking a gun, but rejects it. She’ll never shoot Quynh. But what if Quynh had allies? Should she shoot them? 

Nicky’s sword is back on his waist. A creature comfort that warps time around him. He, like she, is an anachronism walking. It feels right to put her labrys where it belongs at her back. It still feels more performative than anything else. He doesn’t meet her eyes when he takes an assault rifle and a pistol. Booker does, when he carefully plucks up his weapons. “You okay, boss?” he asks quietly. 

“Fine,” she says.

They drive to the factory, and begin their search. Each taking a different part of the building to explore. Andy’s feet carry her forwards, but she barely takes in her surroundings. At every creaking sound, she turns and wonders—is this it? Is Quynh finally going to be there, in front of her, like she’d dreamed of for so long? 

Quynh’s necklace, a promise and a prayer in one, hangs from Andy’s neck as it’s done every day since the moment Quynh put it there. Time has smoothed out the edges on the back and front. Her thumb’s worried it over and over through the years. It’s dulled the lettering that used to read  _ life  _ in Quynh’s language. Andy imagines the word still there. A joke they’d shared for thousands of years. 

Andy walks. She walks up and down staircases. She peers blindly into rooms that were left in such disarray that nothing good could ever come from them. She reaches the main factory floor, and she glides past the massive smelting pots and industrial forges until finally, she sees something that doesn’t belong. 

A blood red coat, draped over a bench, with not a speck of dust on it. Andy approaches. Her fingers reach out. She picks up the coat. It’s soft and warm beneath her hands. It’s good material, heavy and comfortable. She presses her face to the fabric, breathing in the smell of soap and sweat. She’d like to say she can recognize the smell. That hundreds of years did nothing to distract her from Quynh’s scent. But she doesn’t. It’s a bodily odor and nothing else. 

But then.  _ Then.  _ She hears a voice. “You’re still beautiful, after all these years.” 

Andy turns. She’s holding the coat to her chest like a child with a doll. It’s all that grounds her to reality, when she meets Quynh’s eyes. For days, Andy has watched Quynh in one security camera after another. In one satellite image that Copley hijacked, to another. She’s tracked Quynh’s footsteps across Europe, and yet seeing her in person is unlike anything she could have imagined. 

She’s perfect. Slim and slender, straight backed and long haired, heart shaped face and  _ beautiful  _ eyes. Her lips are painted and her clothes are lovely. Tears spring to Andy’s eyes. She breathes out the name, “Quynh,” and she takes a stumbling step toward her. Desperate, needy. Quynh smiles, her upper lip parting just enough so Andy can see her teeth. Andy drops the coat. It falls from her fingers as she rushes to Quynh’s side. Her arms wrap around Quynh’s body instead. 

Quynh wraps her arms around Andy’s back and the embrace is everything that Andy remembers. A perfect weight against her chest, a perfect frame within her arms. The tears fall perfectly from her eyes and Andy tucks Quynh’s head beneath her chin. She weeps and trembles, squeezing Quynh to her and unable to consider anything else. 

She pulls back only to press kisses to Quynh’s face. Her brow, her eyes, her cheeks, her lips. She’s sobbing openly, cupping Quynh’s face between her palms. Quynh’s crying too, clinging to Andy as if she’ll never again be able to let go. “You’re here,” Andy babbles. “You’re  _ here.”  _

“I’m here,” Quynh confirms. 

“Is Yusuf here?” Nicky asks. Andy flinches and turns. He’s standing only a few meters away, gun raised and aimed pointedly at Quynh’s head. She smiles despite the threat. She leans against Andy’s body, and Andy has a sudden thrill realizing that Quynh’s using her as a shield. Nicky won’t shoot her if Andy’s in danger. They all know it. Yet his gun doesn’t waiver a bit. It stays aimed at Quynh’s face, and Andy grasps desperately for words to say. 

Especially when Booker emerges from the dark as well. His hands holding tight to his rifle. His eyes flickering over Quynh and Andy like he doesn’t know what he’s seeing and isn’t sure he wants to find out. 

“Nicolo,” Quynh says his name with a sigh of pure pleasure that Andy struggles to understand how she could have done any of the things she’d done since she revealed herself to Booker. “It’s good to see you little brother.” 

“Where’s Yusuf?” Nicky asks again. His aim doesn’t waiver. Neither does Quynh’s position. If anything she snuggles only closer to Andy. Discomfort wells within Andy’s stomach, standing here between them. It’s never been where she’s wanted to be. 

She takes a deep breath and gives Quynh’s neck a light squeeze. In Quynh’s first language, Andy beseeches her. “Quynh...please tell us where Yusuf is.” 

And Quynh looks up at her. She places a hand on Andy’s face. She smiles that well loved smile, and she replies in that same tongue, “No.” 

Nicky spits curses at her. He marches closer. He’ll tear Quynh from Andy’s arms if he has to, and Andy finds herself standing boldly between them. Nicky stops. He doesn’t look betrayed, but his anger is still there. His face is a mask of cold fury. His rage builds as he looks  _ through  _ Andy to Quynh. As if Andy is simply a placeholder for temporary protection, easily removed at the end of the day. 

They all know it isn’t true. 

“Tell me,” Nicky demands, using the same language as Andy, as Quynh. A language so ancient it’s barely recognizable in its modern form. They’d never taught it to Booker. There hadn’t been a need. He’s standing to the side, staring at them all and trying to follow the conversation. Andy doubts it’s all that hard, from everyone’s reactions it’d be impossible to not know the course of the dialogue. 

“You had a box when you landed in Riesa,” Booker says in French. “We saw you.”

“I buried it,” she replies. She isn’t taking her eyes off Nicky, and Nicky hasn’t let himself lose track of her. 

“Where?” Nicky asks. When Quynh doesn’t reply, Andy turns her back to Nicky and once more cups Quynh’s beautiful face. 

“Please. Where did you bury it?” And because Andy asked her, Quynh tilts her head to the side, and Andy lets herself look. There’s a soft patch of dirt behind one of the smelters. Where the concrete had been torn up and left only the ground beneath. A shovel lies beside it, and Nicky finally drops his gun from where he’s kept it trained on Quynh this whole time. 

He runs to the shovel. His gun barely makes it back to its holster before he grabs it and starts to dig. Booker’s there as well, scrambling at the ground with his hands. Throwing it in all directions as they work. Andy steels her heart against it. She looks back to Quynh. She asks, “Why?” 

“I wanted you to come to me,” Quynh tells her. “And I wanted to prove something to myself.” 

Nick’s breaths echo in Andy’s ears. Desperate and panicked. He’s digging with a kind of ferocity that Andy had never seen before, but it will be over soon. They’ll have Joe, and they can all go home, and maybe Joe and Booker will be upset for a while, but they weren’t permanently harmed. It’s only been a few days. They can still make this work. Quynh’s entitled to some anger after everything. 

And when she looks up at Andy and says “It’s good to see you,” Andy can only nod and say the same back. The sounds of Nicky unburying Joe’s grave mere atmospheric than debilitating.

“It’s good to see you too,” Andy replies. She thinks of taking Quynh to their hotel. Bathing her, worshiping her. She thinks of falling asleep with Quynh in her arms, right where she should always be. She thinks of sharing Quynh’s favorite meals with her, and showing her the way things have changed. 

Nicky’s shovel it’s something hard and he gasps in relief as he redoubles his already frantic efforts. Booker’s hands are caked in blood from where he’s torn flesh and nails in his desperation. They dig around the edges of the box, uncovering the top, and get to where the lock is. Relief pours through Andy. They’re almost done. Quynh smiles so beautifully up at her. 

Nicky slams the shovel into the lock once, twice, three times. It isn’t budging, and he sounds like he’s about to cry from sheer frustration. Booker presses a hand to Nicky’s chest and then aims his gun at the lock. He shoots it, and it shatters. Together they peel open the top of the box and Andy will never forget the tortured noise that drags itself from Nicky’s chest as he collapses to his kneels before the empty coffin. 

“I never said he was in it,” Quynh informs them primly, entirely unaffected by the scene. She steps away from Andy and walks perilously close to where Nicky’s fallen. She sniffs her nose in disgust at both her little brothers. One openly crying in shocked agony, the other glaring so hatefully at her that he might well be the first to land a fatal blow upon her goddess frame. “I have spent many years thinking about what would happen when I came home.” 

Dizzy with emotions, Andy whispers her name. She doesn’t even know what she wants to say or how to say it, but she knows that this can’t go on. Nicky’s eyes haven’t left the coffin. Haven’t abandoned the empty box he’d been so sure Joe had been in. 

“This is what will happen,” Quynh says, speaking over Andy entirely. “I will live with you all. I will be a member of this family. You will  _ treat  _ me like a member of this family, and you will  _ never  _ let anything like... _ that  _ happen again. Do you understand?” Nicky doesn’t respond. Tears are falling so fast from his eyes that Andy fears he may have had some kind of psychotic break. His shoulders aren’t hitching in sobs, he barely seems to be breathing, but he’s looking at the box like Joe will appear at any moment and Andy doesn’t know what to do. 

“Why the fuck would we let you live with us?” Booker asks. “After what you did? After what you’re  _ still  _ doing?” 

“Because I’m still doing it,” Quynh replies just as sharp. “You will not let me die. You will not hurt me in any way. You will not allow anyone else to hurt me. Because if you do—you will  _ never  _ know where Yusuf is.”

Enough is enough. “Quynh, no, please.” Andy steps forward. She takes hold of Quynh’s arm. “Not like this, please. Tell us where Yusuf is.” 

“You stopped looking when the last sailor died, didn’t you?” Quynh asks. Andy feels her body going numb as she stares into the dark eyes she fell in love with so many years ago. “Well. You all can keep looking. And I won’t die. And when I feel as though you’ve  _ earned  _ it, I’ll tell you where Yusuf is. Simple as that. But if you decide to convince me by hurting me,” she says this to Nicky and Booker, tone as steel cold as the factory walls, “I’ll never say a single thing about him ever again. And if you let me die, then maybe I won’t come back. And you’ll have to wait five hundred years or more for him to break his way free.” 

“Quynh,” Andy breathes out. “Please don’t do this.” 

“Am I understood?” Quynh kneels down in front of Nicky. Inches from his face. He finally looks up to meet her eyes. He’s stopped crying. The tears are drying on his skin. Andy knows that look. She’s seen it so many times before. Nicky nods, wordlessly, and Booker lets out a stream of curses and hateful remarks that go nowhere because he’s dropping his gun and kicking at a rock he’d dug up and all of it’s aimed away from Quynh who has bought her homecoming in blood. 

Quynh holds out her hand. Nicky takes it. Together they stand, and as a group...a family...they all leave the factory and go back to Paris. Copley and Nile are waiting for them. And with nothing to keep them here in Riesa, they return home. 

* * *

Deep underground, far, far away, Joe gasps awake in his coffin. There’s no new air to breathe. He’ll suffocate again in a few minutes. But he gathers as much strength as he can to pound against the metal above him. 

He doesn’t have a full range of motion to do a proper punch, but he keeps his elbow tucked to his side and he rockets his fist up as hard and fast as he can. 

_ Bang.  _

_ Bang.  _

_ Bang.  _

_ Bang.  _


	4. Chapter 4

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> THANK YOU SO MUCH TO EVERYONE FOR YOUR AMAZING COMMENTS - I'VE NEVER GOTTEN SO MANY AT ONCE BEFORE. YOU ALL ARE THE BEST!!!!!!

"What the ever loving  _ fuck? _ ” 

“Nile…”

“No, seriously, what the  _ fuck?”  _ Copley had told her that the team was coming back. He’d  _ said  _ that Quynh was coming with them. What he hadn’t said, was that she was coming back in one piece, looking perfectly pleased at punch about their current living arrangements. She smiles when she sees Nile, and actually hugs her. 

She says, “It’s so nice to have another woman in the family,” and Nile jerks out of her grasp to get a good look at all their faces because this is a level of insanity she genuinely hadn’t suspected them capable of. Andy looks more tired than Nile had ever seen her, but at least Booker still has a genuine expression of hate on his face that can’t be ignored. Nicky…is walking away from all of this. 

He steps around Nile, past Quynh, and into the bedroom at the end of the hall. He closes the door with a click, and Nile barely has time to think about all the implications of  _ that  _ before Booker’s taking her by the arm and leading her to the sofa against the wall. He has her sit, then sits down next to her. Quynh watches with the a truly unnecessary smile. Nile very much wishes she’d turn it on someone else. 

“What’s going on?” Nile asks. “Where’s Joe?” 

Booker’s jaw clicks so loudly from where he’s grinding his teeth that if he didn’t heal, she’d be worrying about him needing a dentist. He practically needs to chew on her name in order to get it through his teeth. “Nile…” 

Quynh tilts her head to one side. Her dark hair falls over her shoulder. She asks, “Did you become close with him in the past few months?” And Nile’s fists clench.

“Maybe you'd deserve an answer if you weren’t into kidnapping people and burying them alive.” Quynh throws her head back and laughs so brightly that it does absolutely nothing to quench Nile’s desire to bury her knuckles into Quynh’s face. She forces her head to turn away from the woman and look only at Booker. “What’s going  _ on?”  _

“She’s…got us by the balls,” he says delicately. 

The rest of his explanation is given in an equally terse manner and all it leads to is Nile cursing once more.  _ “What the fuck are you thinking?”  _ Andy pours herself a tall glass of bourbon and Nile wants to throw it across the room. “This isn’t going to get you what you want,” Nile growls at Quynh. She throws herself back to her feet. “You can’t just force your way into a family.” 

“That’s how everyone joins this family,” Quynh says. “By forcing their way in. Fate, isn’t it? _Destiny._ ” Nile very nearly makes good on her desire to just hit that placid expression off Quynh’s face, but Booker snatches her wrist. 

“Go check on Nicky,” He whispers into her ear, harsh and desperate. “We’ll…we’ll deal with this okay?” 

“Nicky?” Nile scoffs. She glares at Andy. Andy’s half done with her glass and eyeing the bottle like she should have just drank it straight. “Did you even  _ think  _ about Nicky when this deal was made?” 

Andy doesn’t look up at her. She keeps her head down. Her attention on her drink. She knocks back the rest of her glass and refills it the same amount. She doesn't infinitely heal anymore. She’ll be drunk in a matter of minutes like this. Anger is Nile’s only friend at the moment. Anger, and Booker who seems to only holding her back because he’s trying his very best not to make things worse for them in the interim. “Would you have wanted to make house with the witch hunters who took Quynh?” Nile spits out. Andy takes another drink. She turns ever so slightly away. 

Disgust runs through every part of Nile’s body. She jerks her arm free from Booker’s hold and stomps as loud as she can to the room Nicky’s holed himself in. Behind her, Quynh says “Kids are so easy to upset,” and it takes all Nile has to not smash her fist against the door. Instead, she knocks twice as gently as she’s physically capable of being, says who she is, and then twists the knob. 

Nicky's curled up on the bed. His arms are wrapped around his body, his brow tucked into the crook of one elbow, one hand slithered through the short ends of his hair. It almost looks like he’s petting himself. Stroking his fingers up and down in a self-soothing form of comfort that breaks her heart the moment she sees it. 

She closes the door behind her, locking it to keep the whole world out, and crawls onto the bed behind Nicky. She’s never done this before, but it doesn’t matter. The motions are instinctive. She wraps one arm around Nicky’s waist and she ducks her head against his shoulder. They lay there in complete silence, neither offering any words of comfort to the other. 

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

* * *

Booker knocks on their door hours later. Nicky hasn’t moved an inch the whole time. Nile’s shifted or rolled over, but he’s stayed exactly the same. It’s not healthy. She knows this. She  _ knows  _ that he needs to get up, move, to not lay in bed. But at the same time, she also thinks he deserves a few minutes to just let the crushing weight of eternity take its toll on his body before he has to force a smile and pretend he's okay. 

At Booker’s knock, Nile sits up. “We got food…” Booker says. He sounds worse than he had before. Nile doesn’t even want to know what it’s like in the main part of the house with Andy drunk, Copley trying to work, and Quynh…being  _ there.  _ “You want any?” 

Nile gently nudges Nicky. He doesn’t respond. Doesn’t even seem to have heard. ”I don't think he's going to eat anything,” Nile calls out. Booker curses in muffled French, but he walks away.

“You should eat,” Nile suggests as soft as she can. she peers over Nicky’s huddled form to look at his face. It’s half buried beneath his arm, but she can make out the trail of his jaw. The clench of his eyes. 

Someone else approaches their door now. They don’t try to knock, instead they try to open it right away. The lock keeps them back, but Nicky’s sitting up. He’s guessed as well as Nile has who it is. They wait for the voice to come. “Let’s have dinner together,” Quynh beseeches. Nicky’s off the bed before Nile has a chance to stop him. 

She tries anyway. 

She catches his wrist as he reaches for the door. “You can’t just do whatever she says for the rest of time, Nicky.”

“Show me another way,” Nicky asks. When she has no response, he steps into the hall. Quynh’s smiling brightly at him. She loops an arm around his back and snuggles a head against his shoulder. He walks with her against him, like she belongs there, and Nile needs to take a few minutes to calm herself down before she can sit at a table and actually  _ exist _ in this new version of hell. 

When she gets there, she’s gratified that Copley’s there too. He meets her eyes and she’s even  _ more  _ gratified when he seems to be thinking exactly what she is.  _ What the absolute fuck is this?  _ The chair next to Copley is free so she sits there and starts making her plate out of the collected assortment on the table. 

Nicky’s between Booker and Quynh, Andy between Quynh and Copley. They’re all moving at a snail’s pace. Picking at their food without really tasting it. Nile doesn’t think Nicky’s even doing that. He’s sitting with food on his plate, but his gaze is lost somewhere in the middle distance. Nile wishes he’d just get angry. Get angry and really let out what he must be feeling. 

Quynh seems entirely unbothered by the tense affair taking place before her eyes. She eats with a delighted relish that’s equal parts amusing, horrifying, and sad. This is a woman who hasn’t eaten well in centuries. This is also a woman who consigned their brother to the same fate. 

Andy’s at least slowed down her drinking. She’s back to water. But from the way she’s swaying a touch in her seat, it isn’t doing much to cut into her efforts from before. Nile spears a carrot savagely on her fork and bites it in half. 

Quynh taps her lips with her napkin. “You know, I think tomorrow you should cook for us Nicolo. I’ve always enjoyed your cooking.” 

Nicky doesn’t even look toward her. Just nods. Says, “Okay.” Fresh waves of anger pound through Nile’s body. She squeezes her fork hard enough to leave indents in her palm. Sucking in air, she glares at her plate. 

_ Don’t say anything,  _ she tells herself.  _ Don’t say anything.  _

“Everything all right, Nile?” Quynh asks. 

“What do  _ you  _ think?” she spits back. 

“I think there’s something you want to say.” 

“Oh there’s  _ something  _ all right—”

“—Nile.” Nicky’s voice cuts through the violence of her thoughts. She swivels about to look at him. To ask how how he could even think to stop her. To ask where he thought the whole farce would end, except badly and with pain. Nicky’s expression is a carefully composed blank mask. It is the antithesis of all it had been for their months of companionship before. His bright eyes aren’t twinkling with mischief, his lips don’t form the loving smile that always reminded her of her father. His posture isn’t straight nor perfect. It’s curled ever so slightly forward like he’s bracing for a blow. 

“It’s not right,” Nile tells him.  _ Him.  _ Because he deserves to know. He deserves to know the truth. That this is wrong. That this is more than a little wrong. It’s disgusting. They can’t all just be expected to sit around the dinner table, laughing and sharing stories as if nothing twisted or corrupt stained every moment of the experience. 

He doesn’t correct her. Doesn’t disagree. He just whispers a quiet request. “Please stop.” He doesn’t need to say the rest. Doesn’t need to explain his reasoning. She understands. Understands more than any of them probably thinks she does. He  _ knows  _ it’s wrong. But he also is a rabbit trapped in a snare. He can fight and thrash as much as he wants, but eventually he’ll lay down and accept that there is nothing he can do but wait until the end. Unless he’s willing to chew his own foot off to break free, he needs to play by Quynh’s rules. 

They all do. 

Even her. 

“Something to say?” Quynh asks, grinning so wide that Nile wonders what it’d be like to stab her right in the face. 

“No,” Nile grits out. Quynh nods, delighted. She leans over and kisses the side of Nicky’s head. A reward for a well behaved puppy. 

Nile meets Copley’s eyes. She doesn’t try to hide any of her anger or desire for retribution. He doesn’t seem inclined to stop her either. He nods, and that’s that. Everyone else may be on board Quynh’s Stepford Family Train, but they are definitely  _ not.  _

* * *

When Nile first joined the team, she was aware that there were certain things that just  _ happened.  _ There were parts of the team that were just the way things were. They’d been together for hundreds of years, they knew each other’s place in the unit, and Nile simply needed to find her own niche in the group. Her baptism by fire, rescuing everyone at Merrick’s lab, gave her some idea of where she wanted to be. It gave her some idea of how things operated too. 

Andy liked being the first one in. She liked pushing forwards and being the breach, always taking charge. Always the leader. Joe was almost always at the back, watching their tails and ensuring that they never got snuck up on. Nile found her place at Andy’s side, keeping her from doing something  _ stupid.  _ She figured she remembered what it was like being mortal far better than Andy did. She knew when to throw herself in front of Andy and when to just get that final shot in to keep Andy safe. Booker stayed in the middle, offering support to whichever end needed it most. And Nicky? Nicky coasted between the front and back of the group like a Newton’s cradle. One moment watching the rear, the next, the front. He slipped forward and back so quickly and with such fluidity that Nile hadn’t even thought anything of it. Especially not whenever she turned around and saw Joe always one step behind handling the human waste that Nicky threw his way. 

With Joe gone, Booker back, and Quynh now apparently on the team, things changed even more. Because while she made sure that Andy stayed alive no matter what, Nicky now took that job for Quynh. It left Booker to play front and back, watching all their sides and trying desperately to keep up. No one talked about his exile anymore. He didn’t bring it up, and none of them were interested in arguing about it. Forgiving Booker seemed easy in light of Quynh. Besides, Nile’s endlessly grateful she doesn’t need to deal with this drama on her own. 

It only took them three days before Andy suggests they go on a mission. Nile had argued vehemently against it, but when Quynh took her side, Nicky did as well, and that left Booker and her as the odd ones out. They lost a battle of wills destined to ever be tilted in Quynh’s favor, and so they returned to what had for months been a thrilling adventure for Nile. They went out on Copley’s leads and they saved lives. 

Except it all felt  _ wrong.  _ Booker lying by Nicky’s side when he used his sniper rifle, playing spotter when he’d never needed to do it before, felt  _ wrong.  _ Nicky up at the front, always, because Quynh and Andy fought like a team and he would throw himself bodily between Quynh and any threat in near suicidal desperation, felt  _ wrong.  _ Nile struggling to find her place in the middle, and Booker swallowing up the rear all of it made her feel like she was dancing a waltz during a tango. Her feet kept stumbling beneath her and the missions ended while she tried to regain her balance. 

And when they return to whichever safehouse they were at, Quynh laughs in delight. She cheers their victories. She celebrates their talent. Nicky drags himself to the shower in silence. Booker starts drowning in the bottle, and Nile is left to watch her brothers cope while Andy caters to Quynh’s exuberance. 

It’s  _ hateful.  _

Worse yet, Nile’s almost certain that Nicky never sleeps anymore. When they turn in for the nights, she finds him sitting at a laptop, following after the endless stream of iron boxes Quynh shipped all around the world. When she wakes up, he’s still in the same position. Sometimes with coffee, sometimes without. He makes breakfast for them all without being asked, but barely touches the food in front of his face. The few times he does, he throws up not long after. 

Andy ignores it with clenched teeth and forced smiles. Nile catches her slipping bread and bananas to Nicky at airports. She also catches Nicky tossing them out and lying that he ate them. “You should eat,” Nile tries more than once. Nicky looks at her.

“It’s genuinely not necessary.” He doesn’t say any more on the topic, opting to leave her to the horrifying realization that he’s right, and hating every moment that she knows it’s a fact.

“He wouldn’t want you to starve,” Nile tries again.

Nicky says, “No, he wouldn’t,” and refuses to change his ways. 

It’s untenable. 

And still it continues. 

Nile tracks Nicky’s progress in his search through the harsh lines he marks in his notebook. She tries to do digging on her own. She compares notes with Copley. Booker does the same. All they find, time after time, are dead ends or empty boxes. He could be anywhere. He could have been on that very first freight ship. He could have been tossed overboard before they ever got there, and a different box simply led them astray. 

Nile doesn’t know what Nicky's going to do when all the leads end and all they have left is Quynh. He’ll probably do exactly what he’s doing now. Catering to her every whim, and staying up all night, isolated in his grief. 

It’s almost a month into this farce of a living when Nile throws in the proverbial towel. During one of their standard awkward breakfasts, where Nicky’s cooking still tastes just fine but it also feels  _ wrong  _ like everything else feels wrong, Nile says “Nicky and I are going out today.” It isn’t a question, and when he peers up at her, he doesn’t outright refuse. He glances slightly to his right, but Quynh hasn’t put the breaks on it yet either. 

“That sounds good,” Andy says before Quynh could even think about rejecting it. She nudges Quynh with her arm. “We should see about finding you a new bow. One that fits you bit better than the one you’ve been using.” 

They spend the rest of breakfast discussing possibilities and the changes in bow warfare in five hundred years, and Booker spends the rest of breakfast giving Nile the side eye. He says he’ll clean up once we’re finished eating, and Nile takes that excuse to catch Nicky by the hand and pull him toward the door. 

It only takes moments. They get into Nile’s rental and she pulls onto the main road. He still hasn’t said anything about her maneuverings, but Nile doesn’t care in the least. “Go to sleep,” she tells him. “I’m just gonna drive south. I’ll stop for food and gas. Just...go to sleep.” 

He could fight her on it. He  _ could.  _ But he doesn’t. He slumps against the door, closes his eyes and is out before she even hits the highway. She plays soft music that doesn’t disturb him and just drives until the car runs on empty. True to her word, she pulls over, fills up, gets back in, and keeps on driving. 

It’s not an escape. It isn’t even an attempt to escape. It’s just a desperate need to be free of the choking atmosphere of that house for one God-damned day. Nicky wakes up after four hours of constant driving. His skin actually seems like some color’s returned to it, and the dark circles that have been staining his face look just slightly better. They aren’t sagging into his month-old beard anymore either. 

“Are you okay?” Nicky asks, quiet as a ghost. Nile’s fingers tighten on the steering wheel. She glances at him from the corner of her eye. Rage threatens to explode from her lips, but she swallows it down. 

“I’m doing better than you, I think.” 

“It’s a low bar,” he admits. 

“You’re damn right it is.” He doesn’t laugh like he might have, once. She misses the sound of his laugh. “Nicky...I’m worried about you.”

There are standard responses to statements like that.  _ I’m fine, don’t worry, I’ll be all right.  _ Nicky doesn’t say any of them. He sags more firmly against the door. He huddles his arms across his chest. He looks like a child, and she isn’t equipped to handle that. She’s twenty-four years old, not nine-hundred and change. She doesn’t know what she’s supposed to say to him to make him feel better, and all her role models are currently  _ shit.  _

She strokes the wheel with her thumbs, searching for something to say. “It’s not right what she’s doing.” 

This, he deigns to answer. “It’s not.” 

“What are we gonna do? It can’t be this, Nicky. It can’t be.” 

What little rest he may have gotten seems to have been drained out of him in just those moments. He sighs heavily. He shakes his head against the window. “I don’t have the answer. This is all I can do.”  __

“She’s  _ killing  _ Joe, she’s  _ torturing  _ us.”

“This isn’t torture.” 

“Isn’t it?!” Nile slams on the breaks and pulls over to the side of the road. It’s so fast, Nicky throws his hands out to catch himself on the dash. She swivels about to look at her, blinking rapidly. His confusion does nothing to break through Nile’s anger, finally unleashed in the face of his refusal.  _ “Look at yourself!”  _ When he doesn’t move, she reaches over and jerks down the visor to reveal the mirror. She points at it viciously. “LOOK.” The flicker of a glance isn’t enough. She screams it again and again until just to make her stop, he looks. “How is she not torturing you?” 

“I can’t stop it, Nile. She’s the only one who...who  _ knows  _ where he might be, and I don’t have any other way to find out. It doesn’t  _ matter _ anymore.” 

“It matters, it has to matter. Nicky you’re falling apart.” 

“This isn’t something I know how to fix.” 

“There has to be a way to make it easier, at the very least.” 

Nicky closes the visor. He shakes his head. “I’ll be all right. It’s...it’s a game. A cover. An act. Sometimes we do things we don’t want to do for the mission, that’s all this is. And she wants, what? Food? Companionship? It’s not a hardship. Not really. I’d have done it before...”

“Before she buried your beloved  _ alive?”  _ He flinches so hard she almost regrets asking. 

“Where are we?” he asks.

“Almost to London, probably.” 

“Take us home.” 

“To the safe house?”

“No.” Realization strikes, and she nods. She merges back onto the highway and takes the next exit to get onto the right path. “Andy’s happy,” Nicky murmurs after about fifteen minutes of awkward silence. 

Nile screeches at the road. Nicky actually jumps in surprise, blinking at her with such a stunned expression that she’s almost happy she managed to get him off the blank look of utter desolation that had haunted him for so long. Almost. “If that’s what Andy looks like happy, then I’m glad I didn’t spend nine hundred years with her.” 

“You don’t think she’s happy?” he asks. He sounds so genuinely confused that it hurts. 

“Would you be? If it was Joe who locked Quynh away and was holding all of us hostage, and you had to watch Andy go through what  _ you  _ were going through now?” 

“No.” He says. _ But I’m not Andy _ , he doesn’t say. It sits in the air like an albatross anyway. She kind of wishes it didn’t. 

Nile thinks about it more as they drive.  _ Is  _ Andy happy? She laughs and talks with Quynh while the rest of them awkwardly flit about her in an attempt to be Nice, but not There. She goes on outings with Quynh. They sleep in each other’s arms. Nile isn’t the only one disgusted by it, she’s almost grown fluent in every French curse word thanks to Booker. He mutters them ad nauseum under his breath, glowering their direction more than once. 

But after six months by Andy’s side sans Quynh, Nile thinks she’s gotten used to at least  _ some  _ of Andy’s mannerisms, and the past month  _ with  _ Quynh...hasn’t felt right. It’s been just as wrong as everything else. Because mixed in on every action where Quynh isn’t looking directly at Andy but Nile is, all Nile can see is guilt. Endless layers of guilt. 

Each request Quynh makes that is met with soldier-like obedience just ratchets that guilt up even more. So yeah, maybe Andy is happy in some abstract way. But not fully. She can’t be. Nicky and Joe are, and always will be, her brothers. And Nile’s known from the start, Andy loved them enough to die for them. And what is this? But dying very slowly in the presence of the one she loves. 

They pull up to the Briar Patch in late afternoon. Nile puts the car in park and Nicky shows her where they keep a spare key so she can let herself in next time without needing one of his own. They step inside and are embraced by the warm love and light of the house. The paintings on the wall smiling down at them with a happiness that transcends ages. The largest of them all, with their first children standing proud at their backs, sits Nicky and Joe.

It takes her a moment to realize, this is the first time in a month that she’s seen Joe’s face. None of them have pictures of him. It hadn’t even occurred to her to take one. Not when anything could be hacked and Copley was spending so much time scrubbing them from the face of the earth. But there he is. Smiling with Nicky at his side. Their boys grinning in delight as their adopted father painted their faces into canvas-immortality. 

Nicky stands before the painting for a long while. The last time they were here together, he’d only ever looked at the children. But now, it’s Joe. Her heart aches, and she steps toward him. Her arms wrap around his left elbow. Her hands slide down to cup his. 

“Joe wanted to add you,” Nicky tells her quietly. He points off to the side. There  _ is  _ still room for another painting, but the context takes some time for her to understand fully. 

“Nicky…” 

“You have a family. I know.” 

“That’s not what I was going to say.” He waits, and it gives her a moment to put her thoughts into words. “Why me? Why not Booker? He was young once too. Comparatively at least.”

“I don’t know,” it sounds like a cop-out, but he presses on before she can reject it. “He was an old man before he was immortal. It hadn't occurred. Probably. And...you remind me of my daughter.” Her eyes slide to the only black woman on their wall, but he shakes his head, leads her to a different portrait. “Saifa,” he introduces. She’s not white, but she’s not black either. A kind of mulatto brown that still stands out when settled next to Louis-Charles or the blonde Princes of the Tower. She has beautifully embroidered shayla wrapped around her head, in stunning reds and golds. But at her side sits something that hadn’t appeared in other portraits. She has a sword. And in the back, a bow and quiver full of arrows. “She was orphaned during the Morisco Uprising in Spain. She never actually came here, we raised her in Iberia. She wanted to avenge her family and so we trained her as best we could. When she decided she’d learned enough, she left and began to help stranded Muslim children to reuinte with their families. She escorted them to Morocco, or she fought back against the Inquisition.”

“She’s not famous,” Nile guesses, because neither the face nor name is familiar. He shakes his head. 

“She was just one of many people doing the same thing at the time. She died at fifty-three. The Inquisition found her in the end, and when she refused to convert or repent, they killed her. We didn’t make it in time. We’d warned her, not long before she was captured, that she was getting reckless, and she told us it was better to be reckless and do the right thing, then stand idle when injustice stalked the earth.”

“She was right.” 

“As I said,” he murmurs. “You remind me of her.” 

“I wish…” Nile looks up at the faces of children raised under his hand. Seven faces. All from different walks of life. Princes and Kings, to Moorish orphans born in the most impoverished parts of Spain. “I wish I could have met them.” It’s not a terribly  _ kind  _ thing to say. They are all dead, and Nicky’s living with that pain even now. But he nods despite that. 

“When Louis-Charles died, we decided not to...not to take any more children for a while. It hurt, quite a lot, knowing that we only had four years with him. Wishing we could have given him more.” He shakes his head. “You’re very young, Nile.” He shakes his head again. “I apologize. I should not have—”

“—It’s fine.” She squeezes his hand.  _ “You’re  _ my family now. My mom and brother are my family, but you are too. All of you. And when we find Joe, we’ll get a picture done, all right? And maybe this time—all of us are in it. We can even leave some space for whichever new kid comes out of the future. But...you gotta be around for that too. You gotta start taking care of yourself too. You can’t just exist on the bare minimum. You’re already getting beaten to shit by Quynh, don’t beat yourself up along with her. That’s just making her win  _ that much  _ more.” 

His right hand rubs at his face. It slides back through his hair. He breathes slowly and steadily for a long time. “I’m no good at taking care of myself,” he admits. “When I eat...I think Joe is not eating. Why should I eat? When I sleep, I hear him beating against that coffin. They’re not  _ dreams,  _ not like you or Booker had, but I hear him anyway. Screaming. Calling my name. I open the coffin every time I close my eyes, and sometimes it is empty, but sometimes he’s there and he’s dead and rotting. His time came, and I didn’t know. I’ll never know. Not until a new one of us dies and can tell me that they’re dreaming of Joe in the dark.” 

“We’ll find him, Nicky.” 

“When?”

“I don’t know. But we’ll find him. And when you need a break? When you need to just, get out and scream about how much you hate Quynh? I’m here for you.”

Nicky wraps his arms around her. He always did have the best hugs, and she’s happy that hasn’t changed since this mess started. She burrows into his shoulder, wrapping her arms around his waist in turn. They rock just a little. She doesn’t know which one of them started it, which one is trying to gentle the other, but it feels so good that she doesn’t care in the least. “We’re gonna get through this, Nicky. Don’t block me out though. I’m here for you. No matter what.” 

“One day, you’re going to be the best of us,” Nicky whispers into her hair. “No…” he amends. “You already are.”

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 


	5. Chapter 5

They’re in another safe house. It’s small, segmented into two rooms and a bathroom. Four mattresses have been pushed close together in the back of one room in a hazy reminder of Goussainville. Quynh’s sleeping, her head resting on Andy’s breast as Andy’s arm wraps around Quynh’s back. Nile and Booker are out too. Nicky’s been awake from the start, staring up at the ceiling as Nile sprawls next to him. He goes to bed when she does, these days, but usually slips away once Nile falls under. Any moment now, and Andy knows he’ll get up. Go to his laptop. Continue his search. 

Nile rolls a bit onto her side, snuggling into her pillow, and Nicky gets up just as she suspected. He leaves his gun for Nile, tiptoeing from the room in perfect silence. Twenty minutes later, Quynh detaches just enough for Andy to do the same. When she gets out to the main room, Nicky’s already put on a pot of coffee. He’s got two mugs out. She pours herself a cup and sits next to him. 

“How’s it going?” she asks quietly, glancing back the way she came. She doesn’t hear any movement, but that doesn’t mean much. Quynh can be quiet when she wants to. Lately, it seems that’s all she wants to be is quiet. 

Nicky’s bangs have started to grow out. They fall into his face, blocking his eyes from view. Andy tucks them behind his ear so she can see him better. He shrugs. “Same as always.” 

Andy takes a long sip of coffee. It scalds her tongue a little. Too hot, too fast. She embraces it. It’s been a long time since something like hot coffee has left an impression on her. The simple fact it does is a novelty that hasn’t yet lost its appeal. Nicky and Copley ran out of boxes last week. They’d checked every source, every location, every lead they’d had at the beginning of this debacle. And now, every lead has gone cold. All the boxes they’ve traced have been empty. So they’re starting back at the beginning. Meticulously watching and rewatching videos in an attempt to find where they could have gone wrong. Pulling up security cameras and satellite images and anything else that could help.

Joe’s been missing for six months. They just passed their one year since Nile joined them. And instead of getting closer to tracking Joe down, it only seems like they’ve gotten farther apart. The world narrowed and then expanded to such an extent, that there is nothing left to do but wait. Wait and hope that soon, something good might happen. 

“I’ve asked her,” Andy whispers. Nicky nods. 

“I know.” 

“I’ve tried—”

“I know, Andy. I know.” Andy’s eyes flicker toward the room. Still nothing. Setting her cup down, she slides a bit closer. 

“We don’t talk anymore,” she says. He laughs. Hollow and empty. When he looks at her, it feels like she’s looking at a stranger. His long hair, dark beard, and pale face don’t match the Nicky she knows now. Nor even the Nicky she first met. He reminds her, dully, of only one moment in their shared lives together. 

When they’d come back from fighting in Jerusalem, and he’d been lying on the ground—sleeping away his eternity because it was better to dream than be alone. She wonders if he doesn’t sleep now because it’d be too easy to just close his eyes and wait for things to be better. Joe’d made him promise never to do that again. To never stop moving and just wait for the world to spin. She doesn’t know if she has it in her to wake him up if he chooses to go, though. And every day those dark circles grow, every day she worries he’ll make that choice. 

“What is there to talk about,” Nicky asks her. “Between you and I?” 

She draws back and finishes drinking her coffee. He returns to his research. A never ending trail of checking and rechecking data he’s already sifted through. Beneath the table, his foot taps a steady beat. _Tap. Tap. Tap. Tap._

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

* * *

Andy takes Quynh to restaurants. They sit in high class establishments and food trucks, licking juices off their fingers and embracing modernity. In one week they have Indian food, Latvian, Chinese, Ethiopian, Mexican, and Italian. Nicky cooks all of Quynh’s favorites from years past, and they dine on delicacies that inspired and nourished them over the years. 

“It’s so convenient,” Quynh marvels as they settle into another booth. The others make themselves scarce whenever there’s an opportunity. Andy sees them sometimes, kicking a football around the park. Going for walks by a river. Heads bent over more research as they continued looking for Joe in the quiet moments they could get. Andy can’t remember the last time she joined them. The moment she approached, they stopped. Waited. Quynh is always at her side, and none of them act the same around her. Quynh says, “It’s all so fast.” 

Andy thinks of how quickly the lines had drawn themselves in the sand and says, “Yeah, it is.” 

“You’re quiet today.” And Andy _can’t_ be quiet. Because quiet means that they’ll be shifting into something else. A different path. A different method. Quynh will try to make her happy, and somehow the others will become involved, and Andy will be forced to watch as they grit their teeth through another engaging scenario none of them want to do.

The last time she’d been too quiet, she’d been watching Nicky do Nile’s hair. Listening as Nile read an Italian National Geographic article about volcanoes, following Nicky’s hands as they pulled apart her braids and combed her hair with oil. She’d been reading it for pronunciation, and Nicky quietly corrected her from time to time whenever Nile tripped over a particularly difficult word. 

Quynh had caught her watching, and asked if she wanted her hair done too. She hadn’t. She said as much. It’s not like there’s much to _do_ with her hair as it is. “It looks nice,” Quynh had insisted. It hadn’t taken much more for Nicky to offer to comb Quynh’s hair. When Booker came in, saw them seated together, Nile glowering from the corner, he’d immediately walked back out. He’s been doing that a lot. It hurts more than Andy has it in her to say. 

“Just thinking,” Andy tells Quynh. “What do you want to eat?” 

“Thinking about what?” 

“Nothing, I just—”

“—Andromache.” Quynh places her hand on Andy’s. She looks up at her with her sweet eyes, kind and full of concern. “Please tell me.” 

“Joe,” Andy breathes out. The hand on hers pulls back. Quynh’s lips press tight together. She straightens. Ready for a fight. Andy swallows but pushes forward. “Quynh, it’s been six months. Six _months._ ”

“And I waited five hundred years.” 

Anger snaps through Andy hot and fierce. She slams her fist on the table. Quynh jumps, staring at it for a long while. “You’re here now. You’re here. We could be together. We could. Don’t you want to be together? Like we were?” 

“Lykon’s dead.” 

“And Joe’s as good as if you don’t tell us where he is.”

She sneers then, an ugly twist of her mouth that does nothing to suit the beauty of her face. “Is that what you thought of me?” she asks. Andy grits her teeth. The waiter comes, chipper and happy. “We’re not eating,” Quynh barks to the young man. He stands there, frozen in shock, as Quynh wrenches herself from the booth and marches toward the door. Andy runs after her, cursing in three languages before she can catch up. “Did you just decide, Quynh’s dead it will be fine?” Quynh seethes once Andy’s caught her stride. 

_“No,”_ Andy says. “No, that’s not what I meant. You _know_ that.” 

“Do I? Five hundred years? You stopped after decades! I never would have stopped searching for you!”

“How would I have found you, Quynh? _How?”_ Andy grabs her hand, jerks her hard to make her stop. They’re standing in the middle of the sidewalk, shouting at one another in languages that haven’t been heard in eons. It doesn’t matter to either of them. “You were in the middle of the _ocean._ Even if I was in the right general area, there was no way to search. I couldn’t see anything. I couldn’t make it more than a few moments at a time at the bottom of the ocean before I drowned trying to find you and woke up with no way to tell if I’d searched one spot over and over again or had moved on to another. I _looked,_ Quynh. I looked as hard as I could and it wasn’t enough, but I _tried._

“But you can choose to let Joe go. You could let him go and he could come home and we could do this right. We could do this _right,_ Quynh. Please. You can’t enjoy seeing everyone like this.”

Quynh shoves Andy back. It’s not a fight. Not an attempt to fight. Just a release of emotions that necessitates violence. “Enjoyment has nothing to do with this, Andromache. You think I like keeping Joe like that? I know what he’s going through. I know what it feels like. I don’t _enjoy_ it. Don’t tell me I enjoy it.” 

“Then let him go!” 

_“I can’t!”_ Quynh shouts it loud enough that people are stopping on the street. They’re staring at Andy and Quynh like they’ve lost their minds. Someone starts to pull out their cellphone to record the argument and Andy snarls at them to fuck off. She catches Quynh by the arm and they start marching to their car. “I can’t let him go.” Quynh tells her once they get nearer. “If I let him go, then I’m not safe.” 

“That doesn’t make any sense.” 

“You know it’s true.” 

“Quynh—”

“—You’ll never let anything happen to me if I know where Joe is. I’m safe so long as I am the only one who _knows._ ” 

Andy unlocks the car and throws herself into it. Quynh sits passenger and turns to face Andy bodily. She’s about to continue her explanation, but Andy’s _tired._ “We never would have let anything happen to you anyway, Quynh.”

“You let them take me.” That hurts worse than anything else. Andy recoils. She tries to catch her breath, but can’t seem to manage it. Turning away, she forces the key into the ignition, missing twice before she gets it in. 

“I didn’t _let_ them.” 

“When we were caught, you said it wouldn’t be long. We’d get out. It’d be fine. But then they killed us, over and over, and they put me in the water, and you weren’t there with me, and you should have been there with me.”

“And I’d have drowned with you.” 

“And we’d have been together. And now look. You’ve wasted five hundred years. You’re dying.”

“Yes,” Andy looks at her. “I’m dying. _And_ Joe’s dying right now, every seven minutes, because of _you.”_ Quynh has nothing more to say, and neither does Andy. 

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

* * *

When they get back to the safe house, the tension has only risen. Quynh throws open the front door and stomps her way through the house. Andy follows her warpath if only to be some kind of buffer should one of the others be home. As luck has it, all of them are home. They’re all outside. Booker’s got music playing loud enough to have drowned out Quynh’s rampage. He’s messing with an iPod to find a good song, while Nicky is correcting Nile’s form as she wields his longsword. His foot tapping hers into position and his hands adjusting her shoulders. 

They look up as Quynh and Andy appear, and freeze under Quynh’s gorgon gaze. Once, Andy remembers, they’d have laughed and asked her to join the frey. They’d have sparred and tousled in the dirt. Even after she’d become mortal, they’d play-fight with her. Scrapping like puppies at the slightest provocation. They’d been more gentle, of course, but they all knew how to fight without doing damage to one another. She doesn’t know when the last time they sparred was. It was well before Quynh. 

Quynh stomps toward Nicky and Nile. Booker makes a half hearted attempt to intercede, but she’s passed him before it’s effectual. Nile stands up from the battle stance Nicky had put her in, wary but temperate. She holds Nicky’s sword in a tight fist. Too tight to be of use. 

“Fight me,” Quynh demands. Nile glances toward Nicky, her lips part, but Quynh corrects herself in a moment. “Not _you.”_ And Nicky’s hand slips around Nile’s and pries his sword free. Quynh goes to the case where all their blades are usually kept. Joe’s scimitar resting beside Quynh’s newly refurbished saber. 

Nicky’s expression hasn’t changed since they’d appeared. It’s the same blank mask that he’s had for months now, but Andy feels her heart start to pound faster in her chest as she makes her way closer to Booker and Nile. “This isn’t a good idea,” Nile murmurs. 

“Depends,” Booker replies. He glances toward Andy and keeps his mouth shut. The pain is a physical thing this time. Andy feels her heart physically miss a beat. It tears at her chest and she nearly chokes on air trying to steady herself from the agony of the misstep. 

Then, Quynh takes up her saber and yells as she charges at Nicky. She stabs to his left, but he blocks. Parries it and is met by her rebuttal. Her blade sings against his. It clangs loudly in the cool of the air. His footwork has only improved over the years. Where he’d started blocky, planting his feet to ensure he could utilize the most weight and power behind his swings, he’s learned to dance. To deflect blows and shuffle to the side, planting only when making a firm strike and immediately correcting up to the balls of his feet when he needs to evade once more. 

Quynh stabs in fast jaunts. Shoulder, shoulder, knee, knee, sternum, downward slash, upward slash. There’s a pattern to her movements, and Nicky follows it with ease. He deflects and parries, side steps and interrupts. She slides her blade down his sword to get an internal strike in, he twists his wrist and nearly disarms her in the process. 

Joe and Nicky spent centuries sparring together. Centuries learning new techniques with Andy. He drops into a fencing stance and throws himself forward, tip of his blade stopping right at Quynh’s chest. It doesn’t touch her shirt, but it’s a whisper away. She slaps the sword down with her sabre and redoubles her effort. 

To her left, Andy can feel Nile’s excitement. She’s grabbed onto Booker’s arm and is whispering to him in unrestrained glee. And it _is_ beautiful. It’s gorgeous watching two masters fight, knowing each other and their weapons so well. Nicky’s longsword isn’t generally a good match against Quynh’s sabre. It’s heavier and harder to move as quick. What he lacks in natural speed, he makes up for in length. He keeps her away from him, and shifts his stances to block and parry each of her blinding assaults. When he finally pushes up close, he does so only when her arm’s been knocked out of position. And only when he’s assured a blow. 

Andy tacks up points in her mind. They aren’t stopping. Not even after Nicky’s ‘landed’ four hits in succession. Chest, arm, arm, neck. He never makes contact, and Andy wants to give Quynh the benefit of the doubt that maybe because of that she hadn’t noticed he’d done it. She does. But Quynh’s anger only increases after every hit. She swings brutally at his body with blows that would have caused serious damage had he let them land. 

_“Stop_ _killing me_ ,” Quynh yells at Nicky as she hacks toward his body. He parries it, steps back. “Stop killing me, stop killing me!” She slices at him again and again. He blocks, blocks, rolls out of the way when he can’t bring his sword around in time. He barely makes it back to his feet when she stabs forward. He parries, but the attack had been aimed dead center. The parry only moves the blade into his right shoulder. Blood splatters on the grass around them. Nile gasps loudly. She takes a step forward but Booker’s caught her by the wrist. 

Enough’s enough. Andy moves toward them. “Quynh—”

“Stop killing me, stop killing me, stop killing me!” She stabs at him. Over and over. Andy runs across the grass. Nicky blocks the first few, but they’re too close now. He can’t bring his sword about. He stumbles, trips. His back hits the ground and she goes to stab him again. His legs scissor kick at her ankles and she hits the ground too. 

Rolling over, Nicky’s almost back on his feet when she thrusts her blade up and catches him right between the ribs. From behind her, Andy hears Nile scream, _“Nicky!”_

Booker yells, “God _damn it.”_

Andy catches Nicky by his shoulders before he collapses. Blood coughs up between his lips. Quynh rolls over, raises her sabre up, but And curls herself over his body and it’s enough to stop the blade from falling. “Move.” 

“No.” 

“Get out of the way!” 

_“No!”_ Nicky’s choking. Dying. Blood splatters the side of her neck as his head rests on her shoulder. He keeps coughing, trying to catch his breath, but his lungs are filling with blood. His right hand spasms around her arm. “I got you,” Andy whispers to him. “You’re going to be okay. You’re going to be fine. Let go, and come back. Okay? Okay, Nicky?” He jerks badly. Then, _finally,_ lays still. 

“Move,” Quynh repeats. She says it cold. Vicious. Her blade is still in her hand, ready to come down the moment Nicky raises his eyes. 

Nile’s there now. She’s kneeling just close enough that Andy passes him to her care. He’s already starting to heal. His shoulder first. The wound stitching itself back together as Andy stands. She stands over his body, keeping him entirely behind her. “Go inside,” Andy commands.

“You don’t tell me what to do,” Quynh snaps back. 

“You’ve already taken Joe, you don’t get to kill the rest of us. _Go inside.”_

“I’ve done worse to Lykon—”

“— _and Lykon is dead!”_ Quynh recoils so sharply that Andy almost apologizes. She flinches from her own words. Guilt spasms through her at the same rate as Nicky’s twitching hand against her arm. Nausea pools within her. She musters everything she has and says. “Go inside.” 

And Quynh _goes._ She goes, and Andy watches as she leaves. When she turns to follow Quynh’s path, she sees Booker. His gun’s out, aimed right at Quynh. If she hadn’t listened, he would have shot her dead. Even as she walks past him, he doesn’t lower his weapon. He keeps it trained on Quynh the whole way, leaving Andy to collapse beside Nicky as air finally re-enters his lungs. He wakes with a gasp. His stomach arches and his head throws itself forward. His eyes search wildly for something that’s not there. That won’t be there for however long it takes before Quynh finally relents. 

An eternity, if today is anything to go by. 

Still, Nicky searches, and when he doesn’t see what he’s looking for. He presses his hands to his eyes and shuts them all out. Booker tucks his gun back into its holster. He kneels on Nicky’s other side. Leans close to him when Nile hesitates to make the final contact. He puts an arm around Nicky’s shoulders, tugs his head to his chest, and whispers something too quiet for any of them to hear. 

Then, slowly, he pulls Nicky up to his feet. They all stumble toward the door. They enter as a huddled group, Booker’s hand still straying to his gun. But Quynh is in the kitchen, washing dishes. She looks up. She’s smiling. All the blood and sweat’s been washed off her body. She’s changed her clothes. She asks, “What do you want for lunch? Andromache and I haven’t eaten.”

And Nicky laughs. It echoes badly through the room. He laughs and doesn’t stop laughing. Covered in blood, and sweat, and everything that hasn’t been washed off yet, he pulls away from Booker, opens the fridge, and starts to make them food. 

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> NOW WITH ABSOLUTELY AMAZING ART BY [Freezer7](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Freezer7) You can find the original on his Tumblr at https://theodoresart.tumblr.com/post/626116954122502144/art-for-this-old-guard-fic-its-very-good-i


	6. Chapter 6

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNINGS FOR THIS CHAPTER: Dub-con
> 
> SEE END NOTES FOR MORE DETAILS

One year to the day Joe went missing, and Booker’s about ready to pull the plug on this whole  _ family  _ charade they keep playing. He’s sick of it. Sick of watching Nile cry because she’s trying to keep it together for Nicky but just  _ can’t.  _ Sick of watching Andy oscillate between a drunken binge and stone cold silence. Sick of Nicky being  _ whatever  _ the hell he’s being. Sometimes he’s a blank mask of endless patience. Sometimes he’s a fucking mess holding it together by sheer spite. 

For a man who barely sleeps, eats only when Nile can see him, and who exists solely because one day he  _ might  _ get something he wants, he’s remarkably functional. And Booker kind of hates that about him too. 

Every waking moment for the past year has been nothing but an endless search for Joe combined with catering to Quynh’s never-ending mood swings. Nile’s a good kid, but she’s the  _ kid.  _ And sometimes, you don’t want to be a mess in front of the kid. Which causes its own sets of issues in its own right. They’re all hovering, watching, monitoring, keeping track of every little bit of minutia, and Nicky’s a bug in a box getting poked and prodded by every member of their family. 

“Give him some space,” Booker mutters to Nile more than once. “You’re hovering.” 

“Better hovering than let  _ her  _ near him,” she gripes. 

“Gotta let him breathe sometime,” he snarks back. 

He takes her out sparring to let off some steam, and at least neither end up with fatal wounds when they’re done. Nicky hasn't joined them again since the last time. He stays in the house, watching absently from afar. Researching, most likely. All he does is research. His latest lead is in Israel. Quynh, or someone who looks like Quynh, may have landed in Tel Aviv when Joe first went missing. He’s been following that for the past week. Slow going as it is. 

Booker’s gone on a few solo hunts. Opened up more boxes than he cares to remember. He’s tried tracking down all the purchases that Quynh made with his money, but a large cash withdrawal likely covered the bulk of the preparation. He has no idea what she could have done with it once it left his account. When this is over, he swears he’ll beat himself up for not paying closer attention to his money. He’s already having Copley manage it. 

Lord knows he doesn’t know what he’d do without Copley. The man’s stayed stationary while they all get sent around the world with Quynh, and he’s been much better of mentally for it as far as Booker can tell. He looks rested, refreshed, and is always there with mission updates or Joe-hunting updates. He’s also there to tell Booker that he looks like shit, and he means it. 

“Yeah,” Booker says every time. “But it could always be worse.” Neither really comment on that. There’s nothing much to say. 

Lately, they've been staying at their seemingly semi-permanent home base in London that’s seen more action in the past year than any other safe house they’ve used in the last decade. He doesn’t know why Nile and Nicky keep quietly pitching for London, but once they get there they usually take off for a day or two and come back looking better than they had when they left. It’s enough for him to jump on the British Bandwagon even if he hates everything about it. 

Booker keeps track of the days shifting beneath their feet in a way that sometimes the others don’t. Time is an abstract concept when you don’t work a nine-to-five, and it’s even more abstract when you jump time zones for a living. But Booker’s fully aware of when the year mark comes about. He even makes plans. Plans that don’t involve twenty-five year old immortals who need to be catered to. Plans that  _ do  _ involve a copious amount of booze and no questions asked. 

All that’s left is getting Nicky away from the girls long enough to actually let loose for five minutes. A mission Booker takes extraordinarily seriously. He puts the finishing touches on the hotel that he’d got for the evening: booze, books, movies, and cards all at the ready, and heads home to collect his brother. 

It’s quiet when he gets in. It usually is these days, with no one wanting to talk or move or even _live_ around Quynh. Savagely, Booker thinks the suffocation, if nothing else, is a neat parody to what Joe’s going through. He makes his way through the breezeway into the open kitchen, past the coffee table and sofa, and to the stairs that lead to the bedrooms. He takes them two at a time, already suspecting he’ll find Nicky in the girls’ room. Nile’s hair hasn’t been done in a few weeks, and it’s a slow morning. He might have seen it as an opportunity to do it. 

Booker pushes open the door without knocking, names on his tongue, and stands perfectly still as he tries to process what exactly is happening in front of him. Nicky’s on his back, without his shirt. Quynh’s kneeling above him, topless. They’re kissing. One of Nicky’s hands is cradling Quynh’s left breast. One of hers is holding him there. He’s not throwing her off him, so Booker does it for him. 

He stomps  _ loudly  _ towards them. Quynh jerks up as she hears him. His hand snaps out and catches her by the back of her neck. One step back and he  _ hurtles  _ her like a javelin across the room. She hits something hard enough for the sounds of broken glass to skitter through his head. “Booker,  _ no—” _ Nicky’s saying. Booker grabs  _ him  _ by the neck next and throws  _ him  _ right out the door. 

Nicky hits the wall, shoulder denting the sheet rock, but before he can so much as right himself, Booker slams the door shut between them and throws the lock. He whirls about to Quynh who’s finally gotten back on her feet. “What the  _ fuck  _ is wrong with you?” 

And really, it’s the last straw. The last thing in this whole warped reality. The last stepping stone before the abyss. Booker has tried, very politely, to go along with this idiocy, but this is the end for him. And he doesn’t care if it necessitates a second kidnapping to make it work. "Is it so hard to believe _someone_ wants me?" Quynh hisses as crosses her arms over her breasts. 

"Yes," Booker spits out. "Especially when that _someone_ has no concept of consent around you." 

“You’re out of line, Booker,” Quynh tells him, remarkably calm for a woman in her position. 

“Out of line?  _ Out of line?  _ What the fuck did you say to him?” Nicky’s at the door. It trembles against the frame. It’s a half hearted effort though. Like he isn’t certain if he wants to go back in or not. That’s enough for Booker. Enough by a long shot. 

“We made a deal,” Quynh says. “And you’re interfering.” 

There are only so many deals that she could have possibly offered Nicky, and the most glaring burns him straight through to his core. He takes out his gun and he aims it at her face. Safety off, finger on the trigger. “Say that one more time,” he dares her. 

“You can’t do that,” she says. It doesn’t sound entirely certain. “Stop it. Put that away.” 

“Say that  _ one  _ more time.  _ Tell me exactly  _ what you said to him.” 

Her lips tremble. She looks toward the door. The door that Nicky’s no longer trying to get in through. The one that stands at Booker’s back and is far out of her reach. “One day.  _ One  _ day, where he does what I ask, and I will tell him where Joe is.” 

“How often?” Booker asks. She looks confused. “How often have you done this?” 

“I’ve never  _ fucked  _ him if that’s what you’re asking.” It is and it isn’t. He doesn’t care. Not at this point. Not anymore. 

“You’re a selfish bitch, you know that? A selfish, self-centered  _ whore _ of a bitch.” Rage coats her face. She takes a step forward and he squeezes the trigger ever so slightly. It’s enough to send her back a step. To raise her hands. She’s staring at the gun in terror. A terror so strong that Booker almost laughs at the simplicity of it all. “Tell me where Joe is.” 

“Let Nicky back in,” she dares to say. 

_ “Tell me where Joe is or I put you back in that fucking ocean tonight.”  _ She scatters. Tripping over herself. He grabs her by her arms and throws her back to the ground. She kicks at him and he breaks her leg with a vicious stomp that has her howling in pain. It starts healing itself in moments. It’s not her time. 

She’s shaking her head. Shaking it so fast that the tears in her eyes get lost with the sweat starting to pour from her brow. She’s violently pale. Trembling like a child in the dark. “You can’t, you can’t, you can’t. I’m the only one who knows. You can’t do that to me.” 

“You’re never going to tell us,” he says. “Even now. You’d have fucked him, pet his hair, and lied to him. You’d have taken him to some empty box for him to dig up and relive all over again,  _ wouldn’t you have?”  _ She’s shaking her head. Her lips mouth words that are never given voice. 

Booker’s never taken pleasure in violence. It’s always been a means to an end, but he imagines hurting her. Imagines cutting pieces off her. Imagines breaking her bit by bit by bit. Imagines tossing each of those bits into the sea and waiting to see if she pieces herself back together, and if she does? He imagines doing it again. “What’s the fucking point then?” he asks her. “What’s the point of keeping you here? Keeping you  _ safe? _ Letting you rape or kill us day in and day out with your insane requests?" 

Her eyes grow wider. She tries to get up but he keeps her down. Kicks her brutally in the stomach and thinks about actually using his gun. She isn’t fighting like a seasoned warrior. Isn’t fighting like Andy. She’s blind with fear, trembling and cowering, childish in her terror. A swell of satisfaction surges through him. “Why should we bother with you, if you’re never going to tell us?”

“I know where he is. I know where he is.” 

“Tell me where he is.” 

“You’ll kill me if I do.” 

“I’ll fucking kill you now,” Booker threatens. She stares up at him. She doesn’t speak. She just trembles and stares. Rage  _ slams  _ though Booker’s body. He roars in her face. “You could have had everything you wanted. Did you know that? Every fucking thing. I told you. I told you last year that all you had to do was call. All you had to do was call, and everything you wanted could be yours. But you didn’t want that did you? You wanted to hurt someone. Wanted to punish someone. Wanted to make them suffer.” 

“No. No. I don’t want him to suffer!”

“You threw him into the ocean!” 

“No I didn’t! I wouldn’t do that!” 

“Then you buried him alive!” 

“At least he isn’t drowning!” 

_ “It’s not that much better!”  _ Anger is motivating her through her fear. Fight or flight turning back to fight once more. Quynh struggles to her feet. That’s fine. Let her. He already knows something he didn’t know for sure before.  _ Joe isn’t underwater.  _ It’s one hell of a lead and he’ll keep this up as long as it takes. He’s so tired of watching Nicky torture himself for  _ her.  _ “We’d have given anything to you. Anything! Because we wanted you to be happy. Wanted you to be safe. And now? Now you’ve managed to make every single one of us  _ hate  _ you.” 

_ “That’s not true.”  _ Quynh slaps at him. Shoves at him. He shoves her back. She trips again, hits the wall and steadies herself. “Andromache-Andromache loves me.” 

“Does she?” Booker asks. “Or does she just put up with you because you’re the only one who knows where Joe is?”

“She  _ loves  _ me,” Quynh hisses. “You don’t know what you’re talking about. You don’t even  _ have  _ someone to love. You’re a monster. A pariah. You betrayed them so you could  _ kill  _ yourself. And you did it by selling  _ them.” _

“I got one hundred years for less than three days of pain,” Booker reminds her. “What are you going to get for a year of it?” She recoils. “You’ll lose Andy for sure. And Nicky and Joe? They’ll never want you back. Nile’s hated you from the moment you took Joe, and me? Well, if I’m the best you’ve got _ you’re fucked.”  _ She stares up at him with those big brown eyes that look so tortured he almost laughs. “Even before all this you had,  _ maybe _ fifty years? To get on all of our good sides? Before Andy kicked it? Maybe fifty years to make us love you a fraction of how Andy loves you. And you fucked it up. You fucked it up. You’re right to be afraid. Because you not telling us where Joe is? It’s ensuring that we’ll never have anything to do with you  _ ever again. _ You'll walk this earth alone, and none of us will even spare a thought when your time comes. ”

He doesn’t turn his back on her as he leaves the room. Just backs up slowly, then puts his hand on the knob. “Where we first met,” Quynh says just as he goes to open it. “He’s where we first met.”

“Sure, and I bet you’d love watching Nicky open that empty coffin,” he says savagely. “Wouldn’t you?” Then he opens the door, and steps out into the hall. 

Nicky’s there, arms folded over his chest. He doesn’t think he heard what she said at the end. He doesn’t have the manic look he gets whenever there’s potentially another lead. But he’s standing there anyway, almost like he’s about to walk in and let her do whatever the fuck he thought he wanted her to do to him. Booker takes him by the arm, and guides him effortlessly to their bedroom. 

He locks the door behind him, sets Nicky down on one of the beds, and then goes to find a t-shirt for his brother to put on. “You have to say no to her,” Booker says as soft as he can. “You can’t just go along with her level of crazy all the fucking time, Nicky.” 

“I’m tired,” Nicky says. 

“Go to sleep.” 

“I won’t wake up if I go to sleep.” 

Booker pauses from where he’s digging through a drawer. He looks over his shoulder. Nicky’s hair brushes his chin now. He pins it back when they go on missions. Otherwise, it just hangs. Tangled and unkept. Nile’s made a few attempts at reciprocating her beauty favors with him, but he steadfastly refuses to let her touch his hair. Joe told Booker, once, that Andy cut her hair after they gave up on Quynh. That it’s stayed short ever since. And this is like Nicky's grieving in reverse. Letting his hair grow and grow and grow. Maybe Joe’s the one who usually cuts it for him. Maybe he’s waiting for Joe to come back. Andy talked him into trimming his beard recently. Taking away some of the caveman-chique he’d had going. It isn’t much better now. But it’s not as distracting. Not as truly awful. He still looks a mess.

Returning to his task, Booker finds a decent shirt and hands it to his brother. Nicky takes it, turns it over in his hands. Again. And again. And again. “I’m tired,” Nicky repeats. Booker thinks of the hotel. The booze. The night he’d planned, knowing today would be a shit show, knowing that Nicky  _ hadn’t  _ forgotten the date. One year. One year on. Booker hates worse than he’s ever hated anything or anyone in his life. “You know,” Nicky laughs. “You’re lucky.” 

“Don’t say it Nicky,” Booker warns. 

Nicky ignores him. He smiles, tattered and wrong. “You only had Amelie for forty years...I don’t know how to grieve for a thousand.” 

And that’s it. 

Booker walks past Nicky, walks past the room Quynh’s crying in, walks down the stairs, finds Andy and Nile coming in from  _ wherever  _ they’d fucked off to—oh, shopping—and tells them he’s leaving. “Keep Nicky away from Quynh. Don’t leave him alone.” 

“What-Booker wait!” Nile goes to chase after him. 

But he’s in his car and on the road before she can get another word in. He’s done playing house. Tapping the carphone, he gets Copley on the line. “I need a flight to Tel Aviv.” 

“...Now?” 

“Yes. Now.” 

“And from there?” 

“Get me all of Nicky’s progress on the Israeli box.” 

If he has to chase down every single lead personally, he’ll do it. But he’s not going back home until he finds Joe and all of this  _ stops.  _

* * *

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

* * *

This is what Nicky found out: On the initial flight where they saw Quynh board a plane with three boxes, there’s a member of the ground crew who disembarks prior to take off. She’s of the same height and weight as Quynh and her face never turns toward the camera. She leaves, exits the terminal, and boards a different flight to Israel. An iron box is declared at customs at Tel Aviv, it’s signed for by a Lional Connor. 

Mr. Connor, or Lykon as Nicky’s notes refer to him ever after, has the box transferred via a private moving company. Booker gets off his plane at three in the afternoon in Tel Aviv, rents a car, and goes straight to their main offices. By five, he’s walking out with the details of the delivery. 

The box didn’t stay in Tel Aviv. It traveled south east to Bet Shemesh. Less than an hour later, Booker’s standing at the address it’d been delivered to. He knocks on the door of a white washed house with terracotta roofing that seems to be falling apart. The man who answers is dressed in poor clothes, light and comfortable, but well worn and old. He frowns at him and asks, in rapid fire Hebrew, what he wanted, and who did he think he was knocking on their door so late. 

Joe, Nicky, and Andy all spoke Hebrew. Booker? Did not. He grimaced, held up a picture of the iron box and watched the man’s expression turn tight. “Do you know where it is?” Booker asks in English, slow and steady. 

“Why do you want to know?” the man asks, also in English, accent thick. 

“Because I’ll pay you one hundred thousand american dollars, right now, if you tell me where.” There are some things in life that Booker just knows. He can depend on them more than anything else. Certain buttons getting pushed  _ always  _ have a result. This man is a man of means, and a man of ingenuity. And more than anything: this man is a human. And one hundred thousand american dollars is more than enough to fix his terracotta roof from leaking during the next rain storm. 

“I know where it is,” he hedges. “The woman who asked us to move it. She said it was a blight that should never be opened.” 

“That woman killed my brother,” Booker replies. “I believe his body is in that box. I just want to bring him home and give him the burial he deserves.” And this, this is the most human thing of all: when given the chance to do something right...more often than not, humans  _ do.  _

The man blanches at Booker’s words. His eyes widen in horror. He calls into the house, and two other men arrive. They come forth, and he introduces them as his brothers. “We buried it. We’ll take you to it.” 

They take two cars, leaving Bet Shemesh and heading north toward the West Bank, but they pull off before they cross over. Instead they stop at Rabin Park and say they need to walk the rest of the way. Booker follows them, monitoring the tone they use as the brothers speak in hushed Hebrew along the bushwhacking trail. The concern. The way their eyes flicker back at him, glowing brightly in the streaks of the flashlights they use for navigation only. They’re uncertain. Afraid. They should be. “She said it was cursed,” one of the younger men reveals to Booker. “I do not believe in curses,” he quickly adds on. “But I do not  _ tempt  _ them either.” 

“Probably a good idea,” he says. 

They walk uphill for a long while, then, finally, stop. A large tree looms overhead. Booker stares up at it. A prickle of unease slithers through his body. He doesn’t believe in curses either. But something about this place makes him  _ feel  _ off. Wrong. This tree is old. Large and gnarled and so thick at the trunk that Booker half wonders why it hasn’t been cut down. But for whatever reason, it’s been allowed to grow. Grow and continue to put out that feeling. That uncertain wrongness. 

“We buried it here,” his guides tell him. Booker nods, takes up a shovel, and starts to dig. They watch him for a moment, then bend down to help. One shovel after another hits the dirt. They dig, deep into the ground. Deeper and deeper and deeper until Booker thinks he might be able to see something different start to emerge. 

He slams down with his shovel and it slams into the top of something  _ firm  _ with a clank. Booker licks his lips. He nods to himself, then goes to keep shoveling when he hears something. “Wait, wait stop,” he tells the others. Everyone stops. 

He leans down a little. There’s four of them. With all their digging, it could have been a mistake. But when he taps his shovel against the top of the iron lid one more time, he hears something tap back. 

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

His guides shout. They run. Booker’s left with one flashlight and one shovel and he doesn’t care in the least. He slams his shovel into the ground. He hurtles rocks in all directions. Through it all he hears that noise. 

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

He digs, and digs, and digs. His muscles tear and his breath comes out short, but soon the top of the box is cleared off. 

Bang. Bang. Bang. Bang. 

He gets around to the hinges, makes sure there’s enough room. He goes back to the lock and doesn’t wait this time. He pulls out his gun and shoots it clear off. Then he throws his shovel to the side, digs his fingers onto the edge of the box and in tandem with his brother’s endless attempts - the lid is lifted. 

Joe is free. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Spoiler Notes on trigger warning:  
> Booker interrupts an exchange between Nicky and Quynh where Quynh has told Nicky if he does everything she wants for one day she'll tell him where Joe is. THERE IS NO PENETRATIVE SEX. It is interrupted, and the actually "on the bed" moment is comprised of a paragraph. However, it is important to note that despite there being no penetration, this is a scene of attempted rape/non-con and will be treated as such. He is molested due to his lack of being able to appropriately consent to any of the experiences in this chapter. And though it is immediately stopped, it is important to understand the gravity of the experience. 
> 
> Because this scene will get referenced now, and in the future, and it is discussed in terms of how if it had been allowed to progress it WOULD have been rape, the tag on this series has been implied/referenced rape/non-con. It will be discussed in the future, but there is NO penetration, and Booker does interrupt it very quickly. 
> 
> Please contact me on my tumblr if you wish to discuss in more detail, I do not use this tag, or this circumstance lightly.


	7. Chapter 7

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TRIGGER WARNING: Graphic depictions of violence and racial content- see end note for details.

Joe is _free._

He hurtles upwards, literally grasping for air. Light sears into his brain. He flinches away from it even as he hears a scramble of dirt and rocks behind him. Arms wrap around his waist and then, suddenly, he’s _hoisted_ up. Out of the coffin, out of the grave. He lands on his side and he keeps coughing. His lungs are spasming in his chest, reactivating with a kind of _ah-finally!_ exuberance that cares nothing for his feelings. 

He flounders, knees finding purchase on the ground as he braces himself on his hands. Someone catches him by the back of his neck and he hears, _hears,_ words in his ear. “Breathe. Breathe, brother, breathe.” It’s Booker. Booker got him out. Joe shifts his weight as best he can and clings to Booker’s wrist. He forces himself to look up and meet Booker’s eyes. He’s shaking hard, but he’s _breathing._ Breathing in and out and then, finally, he’s speaking. 

“Book-Booker- _Sebastien.”_ And Booker pulls him close. They’re hugging, and crying, and Joe squeezes Booker to him as tight as he can. 

“I found you,” Booker says. Then, hysteric almost, he says it again: _“I found you.”_ He kisses Joe’s hair. His face. He pulls back and Joe’s still reeling from everything, blinking against the light of the flashlight and looking at Booker in such mystified wonder. 

“Fuck,” Joe curses. Then he laughs. He coughs hard, and Booker pulls away to grab his kit. He yanks a canteen from it and shoves it into Joe’s hands. Joe drinks it until he pukes, and Booker doesn’t try to stop him. Just tells him it’s okay, keep drinking. It’ll be fine. They’ll get more. He wraps one arm around Joe’s waist and helps him walk. “Fuck,” Joe says again, leaning on Booker heavily. “How-how long-how long was I—”

“A year. To the day.” 

_“Fuck.”_ Joe’s feet trip as he walks. He’s unsteady, off balance, but _moving._ He’s moving. Moving and breathing and talking. Joe can’t think. Can’t even pretend he’s thinking. He’s moving because Booker’s making him move, but everything else feels secondary. “Nic-Nicolo?” Joe asks as they stumble badly down the hill.

Booker hesitates, then says, “He’s in London.” 

“Phone?” 

“No.” Booker shakes his head. Joe trips, hissing at a rolled ankle, and Booker adjusts his hold around his body. “Six hours,” he says. “Six hours to fly back to London. You need to tell him in person.” 

“How bad-bad- _bad_ is it?”

“It’s bad.” 

“Oh.” There are lights up ahead. Joe flinches. His retinas _burn_ at the intrusion. He curses and turns away, almost burrowing into Booker’s side in an attempt to avoid the glare. Voices clamber all around them. Hebrew and English mesh together, but Joe can just furrow out a constant refrain of: he’s alive! He’s alive! He’s alive! 

Booker nods, and says, “Because of it, I’ll give you five _million_ american dollars.” 

“Heh...heh...You do l-l-l- _love_ me,” Joe says against his side. 

“I do,” Booker replies. He keeps walking, almost dragging Joe to get him mobile. Joe doesn’t care. His in his brother’s arms. They’re going home. _He’s free._

And the car isn’t that far away, all things considered. Joe gets escorted right to the front seat and settled in. He snuggles against the leather, sinking into the too soft feeling of anything that isn’t an iron slab. 

The rental’s nice. Joe touches everything. The arm rests. The buttons. The vents. He holds his hands at the vents just to feel the tingle of heat that blasts against his palm. He’s shivering, and has been since they finally sat down. 

Booker calls Copley once they get on the road back to Tel Aviv. “I need two tickets back to London,” Booker says. There’s a hesitation, then Booker glances toward Joe. “Don’t tell the team yet, they should see him first, but I got him. I found him. Try to get us something private if you can, if not...it doesn’t matter. We just need to get back.” He finishes the call as Joe starts playing with the dials. Feeling how the plastic rotates under his touch. Delicate and good. “Copley’s glad you’re okay,” Booker says. 

“Me-me too.” Joe touches his throat. It’s been a long time since he’s been able to feel air in his lungs. Some things are taking a bit longer than usual to set back to normal. He can’t complain. A car passes them in oncoming, their headlights burn through Joe’s vision. He squeezes his eyes shut, then forces them back open. He can see. He can _see._ He hasn’t seen anything in a year. Hasn’t heard anything besides his own hammering in a year. Hasn’t felt anything in a year. He presses his fingers back to the heating vent. Booker raises the temperature even more. “You found me,” Joe whispers. The words sound right to his ear. Good.

“Nicky did the research,” Booker replies. “It was just...sheer luck. You have no idea how many false leads we’ve had.” 

“You still-still found me.” Another hitch, but not so bad. It’ll get better, Joe thinks. He doesn’t really care if it doesn’t at this point. He’s so exhausted. Hungry. On queue, his stomach growls and Booker curses long enough to throw his directional on and veer into a gas station’s parking lot. The bright lights blind Joe. He hisses and throws his hands over his eyes. Booker’s out of the car before Joe can say anything. 

For several long moments Joe’s newly regained air feels like it’s leaving him. Each breath is too shallow, too quick. He tries to steady it, get it back to normal, but the deafening silence of the car and the lights from the station are growing too much. The car door opens and Joe jerks his head to see who it is. It’s Booker. Of course it’s Booker. And he has food. Candies and nuts and four different bottles of water, a sandwich and an apple. He shoves them at Joe and Joe descends on it like a madman. 

He bites into the apple and moans uncomfortably loud at the flavor on his tongue. He feels like weeping as his gullet fills one bite at a time. They’re well on their way back to Tel Aviv by the time he manages any form of coherence, and when he does it’s just to say: “You’re my fav-fav- _favorite_ brother.” 

Booker snorts. “I’m your only brother.” 

“Favorite,” Joe confirms either way. 

“I sold you out to Merrick.” 

“Hurt so much because I love you,” Joe sighs. His stomach is full. It’s aching from the weight of the food he’d put in it. Every time he moves his body feels heavy and sluggish. He wonders if he’s slept once the entire time he’d been buried alive, or if he’d merely died and woken up over and over. 

Booker touches his arm. It’s warm and kind. “Go to sleep, Joe, I’ll wake you when we get to the airport.”

Sleep sounds good. Very good. “Favorite,” he repeats, then closes his eyes and dreams. 

* * *

Copley gets them a private plane on a one way trip straight to London. Booker fills Joe in on the details once they board. He tells him about Quynh, and the bargain she struck. About living a fantasy family and how every moment felt like it could be the one moment that finally breaks. About Nicky bending over backwards to make her happy, and how outside of that realm: he’s been devoted to one thing and one thing only. He wanted Joe back more than anything in the world. 

“Why…” The word strangles in Joe’s throat. He takes a deep breath, organizes his thoughts, and tries again. “Why didn’t...Nicky come?” he says. It’s not as clean as he’d have liked it, but it’s good. It works. 

Booker gets him a fresh glass of water. He kneels before Joe, making sure Joe’s hands are steady enough to hold it before he lets him go. His face is a picture of conflict, but the longer he takes to respond the more time Joe has to drink. To figure out how he’s supposed to breathe again. To reorganize thoughts and feelings so when he speaks again, maybe they won’t stutter and flail. 

“Early on we decided it wasn’t a good idea for him to open the boxes we found. Every time one was empty…” he lets Joe fill in the blanks. Joe’s fingers shake a bit as he draws the glass back to his lips. He can hear an echo of Nicky’s despair, reverberating through his head. Booker keeps talking, though, not letting the moment truly fester in his mind. “And in any case, this morning...shit is it this morning? Yesterday? Yesterday morning, I had this plan right? It was the anniversary of you going missing and...I thought he could get away. Just. Not be near Quynh and her crazy or have to worry about being good for Nile. So I left to set something up, and when I got back I guess the girls left to go shopping for food or _something,_ and it meant Nicky and Quynh were alone. I...I found them, together, in - ah- in bed. _Nothing happened,_ I mean, they didn’t have shirts or anything, but they were just kissing and, and after I interrupted it, Quynh said - ah - the only reason Nicky was doing it at all was because Quynh said if he did what she wanted she’d tell him where you were.” 

The words came out so fast that Joe’s struggling to comprehend him. He sips at his water, thinking. Piecing together the story from all the fragments he’d been able to gather thus far. He nods, and Booker hurries to continue. “He’s...he wasn’t okay. And he probably still isn’t. And we didn’t get into a _fight_ exactly, but I just. I needed to leave. And I couldn’t stay there and watch that anymore, and so I left. And I just. He’d been working on the Tel Aviv lead for ages, and I told Copley I’d just go, and so I came. And that’s why. He doesn’t know I left. No one but Copley knows. And shit, it’s only been a day. It feels like it’s had to have been longer, but it’s only been a day.”

“Thank you,” Joe says once Booker finishes. 

“For what?” 

“For helping him. He would-would have regretted it. Eventually. And...thank-thank you for-for s-s-s-save-saving me.” 

“We didn’t stop looking. I know it took a while. I know that—”

“—I know how long...how long it can take.” Five hundred years of failure still sits between him and Quynh. He closes his eyes, rubbing his chest. It’s strange. He’s spent almost a millennium speaking. A millennium using so many different languages. But now, his body can’t seem to remember when to take a breath. When to exhale on a word. When to draw air back into its lungs or stay steady and stagnant. He tries. Tries to regulate it. Deep breath first, words next. But the moment his lungs lose air they pull it back in, desperate for more. The moment his tongue forms a word that requires more _oomph,_ his throat squeezes, restraining any progress. The word gets caught on his tongue, unable to form. _It'll get better,_ he thinks. _It's okay._

His eyes have at least started to adjust. He can appreciate the bright warmth of the plane Copley got for them. And the change of clothes that had been made available once they boarded had been more than a little appreciated. The pants were soft and gentle against his skin. The shirt is 100% cotton and cozy. There’d even been a hoodie, something warm he could just sink into. Copley deserves a raise. A big one. 

“I...I’m sorry for...your book club,” he says. Booker stares at him. “I didn’t listen. I...should...should have listened. I was...wro-wrong.”

“You got nothing to apologize for, Joe—”

“—Listen, _listen_ to me little, little brother. Pl-please. Hard enough to talk with-without repeating my-myself.” He tries for a grin, but probably misses his mark. Booker’s face only falls more. “I knew...knew Nicky was help-helping you. I _knew._ But I was so...so angry I didn’t-didn’t care. So I’m sor-sor- _fucking shit-_ SORRY.” He takes a deep breath once he gets all that out and blows it harshly from his nose. He tilts his chin up defiantly leaving Booker no option but to accept. 

Booker ducks his head, averts his eyes. He mumbles something to himself, then scoots a bit closer. He touches Joe’s hands. “I never wanted this for you,” he says. “With Merrick. With, everything. I said...I said you and Nicky never knew what it was like to be alone. I _never_ wanted this for you. You have to know that. I would never have done this if I—”

“—I know. I knew-knew then too. I just...it hurt. It hurt a lot, and I, I was scared. I hurt you too.”

“No, Joe, no—”

“—I did.” His hands squeeze Booker’s. He says, “You still, still saved me.” 

“You still came to apologize,” Booker says back. 

“Of course, you’re-you’re my brother.” Booker’s brow touches his. 

They breathe the same air for a moment. It’s a funny thought. Breathing the same air. Funny enough that Joe sighs into it. Relishing the contact. The heat Booker’s skin lets off. The familiarity of holding someone’s hands. “I missed you,” Booker admits. 

“Me too. Let’s...let’s not do it again, yeah?” It earns him a laugh. And it feels so good to hear someone laugh. To hear joy. To hear anything except the endless banging of his fists against a metal door that would never open. Not without help from the outside. “I owe you my life,” he whispers.

“Just one of them,” Booker teases.

“No,” He brings Booker’s hands to his mouth and kisses them in supplication. He takes a deep breath, rallies his thoughts, measures them so it can all come out in one stream, and says as firmly as he can manage: “I _owe you my life,_ Sebastien. Thank you.” 

He’d preferred the laughter, but when Booker starts to cry, it means Joe can hug him. And the hug is almost as good. It’s warm and strong and Joe can look over his shoulder and see a world around him. Lit up by modern electricity and ingenuity. He’s going home. _Home._ To his family. He can see his family again. 

_Nicolo,_ he thinks. _I’m coming. I’m coming. I’m almost there. Nicolo. Just a little longer. Please._

* * *

The plane lands in the early hours of the morning. Copley got them a new car, and even arranged to change the keys over himself. He meets them on the tarmac, holding out his hand to clasp Joe’s between his own. “Welcome back,” he says. “It’s so good to see you.”

“You too...you too...Thank you for...helping me.” It sounds almost perfect to Joe’s ear, and Copley squeezes his hands in a firm grip before letting them pass. Booker shakes his head as they get onto the highway. 

“That man’s done a lot of good lately,” he informs Joe. 

“See? Your betray-ay-ay- _al_ was worth-worth it.” The joke lands somewhat decently, Booker snorts and shakes his head. 

His fingers are tightening around the wheel. Joe watches as tension builds back up in Joe’s body. “That bad?” Joe asks again, shivering. He fumbles for the heat, turning it up. 

“It’s...not good,” Booker replies. Joe nods. He rubs at his arms. It doesn’t matter how bad it is. He’s going to see Nicky soon. They can go from there. He’ll get to see Nicky. He’ll make it right. It’ll be okay. 

They reach the apartment the team’s been staying in. Anticipation builds up in Joe’s body. He fumbles only a little with the door, but gets out. Booker leads him up to the breezeway. There are voices echoing from inside. 

Quynh’s, inquisitive. Nicky’s— _Nicky’s!-_ —affirmation of whatever Quynh had asked. Then Nile’s voice, crystal clear through the door. “He’s not your damn slave.” Booker tries the handle, it’s locked. He takes out his key and undoes it. 

“Yes, I’m sure you’d know what _that’s_ like don’t you?” Quynh asks. 

_“What_ did you just say?” Nile shouts. 

Booker opens the door. Nicky’s holding Nile’s wrist, murmuring to her softly. And he looks just as bad as Booker said he would. His posture is all wrong. Head ducking low, back bent every so slightly. He seems to have been in the act of chopping carrots, but his grip is poor and he’s leaning on the counter. Quynh is sitting on the sofa in the attached living room. Andy is standing not far away. 

Joe takes as deep a breath as he can manage. He says, “I don’t know, Nicky, I think Nile’s earned a right to react to that one.” The tableau is solidified and broken in equal measure. Eyes turn toward him, shock and alarm echo through the room. Nicky’s fingers fall from Nile’s wrist as she _yells_ his name. She throws herself in his arms before he even knows what to expect. He catches her with Booker bracing his back to keep them both from falling. Andy says his name, walking toward him like a moth to a flame. 

Nicky isn’t moving. He stands there, one hand still on his chef’s knife, the other loitering by his side. He looks Joe over. His eyes trace every part of Joe’s face. They stay locked in Joe’s gaze for several long moments. 

Quynh shifts on the sofa. It’s only then, that Nicky moves. 

The knife flips around and sails across the room. It strikes Quynh’s left eye and embeds itself into her skull. Between one blink and the next, Nicky’s on her. He leaps the coffee table that’d separated them, shoving her body back onto the sofa while his right hand wrenches the knife free. He brings it up and then slams it down into her skull. 

Andy screams Nicky’s name. Joe shifts, one hand to the back of Nile’s head to keep her from turning to see. The blade rises and falls faster and faster. Blood splatters the back of the sofa, the front of Nicky’s body, it tangles in his hair and splashes up onto his face. Andy tries to reach him, but he snaps out one hand, catches her by the wrist and hurtles her in the opposite direction. Her feet tangle, her legs trip over the downed coffee table and she smacks her head hard on the wall. 

Booker curses and pushes past Joe to kneel at Andy’s side. He checks her over even as Joe keeps his gaze locked firmly on Nicky. He’s stabbing faster now. Half screaming with the effort. The knife tip breaks, metal splintering under the weight of his intentions. He strikes hard and fast and with no intentions of stopping. Quynh’s long since ceased moving. Her face is hardly recognizable as a face. Blood squelches up with each maddening descent, and Andy shouts, “Nicky, _stop._ Joe, make him stop!” 

Joe looks at her. He tilts his head. Nile is trying to break free so she can see what’s going on. He lets her go. If she’s desperate to watch, she needs to deal with those consequences. “You want me...to tell him to stop?” Joe asks slowly. “Why should I?” 

“Because he’s _hurting himself,_ ” And at that, Joe squints at the broken edges of Nicky’s knife. One piece _has_ snapped off it and lodged itself firmly in the hard plating of Quynh’s skull. When Nicky brings the broken blade down again, it slices through his wrist. He doesn’t even seem to notice. Just keeps stabbing. Over and over again. Until he’s nothing but a gore ridden mess of blood and viscera. 

Joe steps forward. Once. Twice. Three times. He kneels between the coffee table and the sofa. Blood splashes up at him as Nicky continues to attack. His movements are slowing now, less coordinated as the sheer energy required overcomes what little capacity he has. He sits, crouched over her, breathing hard and fast, hands limp at his sides, sliced wrist slowly stitching itself back together. 

“Nicolo?” Joe asks. He places a hand on his knee. Nicky flinches so violently from the contact that Joe pulls back. Hands up. Waiting. Waiting. He’s waited a year just to touch that beautiful knee. He can wait an eternity for Nicky to welcome his touch once more. 

But he doesn’t need an eternity. He knows his beloved. Nicky must use all his remaining reserves just to force his eyes off of Quynh and back to Joe. His lips are trembling. The knife slips from his hand, and Joe reaches out. He catches Nicky by the shoulders and guides him to his chest. He wraps his arms around Nicky’s back and very easily slides him away from Quynh. Away from the body he’d made through his rage alone. 

He stands, and Nicky stands with him. Nicky’s head is resting on his shoulder where it belongs, and Joe only has to glance at Booker to be told where the bedrooms are. Up the stairs. End of the hall. It’s so easy to take Nicky there. So easy to pull him along. “Come, come with me. There you go. Yes. Good. Come-Come with me.” 

They reach the bedroom and Joe sets Nicky down. He kneels before him. He holds Nicky’s hands in his. He whispers words in the very first language that Nicky ever learned. “Do-do you see me?” Joe asks, stroking his thumbs over the blood that stains Nicky’s hands. “Do you feel me?” 

“You’re here?”

“I’m he-here.” Joe places Nicky’s blood stained palm against his own chest. Cradling it there. Letting him feel the beating of his heart. Nicky’s hand spasms. His eyes widen ever so slightly, jerking up to look at Joe’s face, then back down to his hand. He’s trembling beneath Joe’s touch. “Here,” Joe says again. “I’m here.” 

"How?" 

"Booker...he-he found me." 

“Where?” 

“Not far from...from Jerusalem. It rem-reminded me of where-where you _slept._ ” Joe keeps rubbing Nicky’s hands. Over and over again. They should have gone to the bathroom first. Joe would have washed it all off him. Gotten him clean. “Booker, Booker used your note-notes. Found me because-because of y-you.”

“You’re stuttering.” 

“Yes. Still...getting used to thing-thing-thing- _things_.” Joe kisses Nicky’s knuckles. His fingers. His wrists. “Let me, let me hold you?” 

Sometimes, sometimes Nicky doesn’t want to be held. That’s okay. Joe won’t force him. But he wants to hold him. Wants to feel Nicky’s body in his arms. Wants to trace the feel of Nicky’s skin against his. Wants, wants, wants. 

“I—” Nicky jerks again. Lost, in a way that he hasn’t been in so very long. “You’re here?” he asks. He leans froward. His fingers trace along the edges of Joe’s face. Joe sighs into the touch, still holding Nicky’s other hand to his heart. Letting it beat triumphant beneath Nicky’s warmth. Nicky’s fingers are not smooth. They’re rough and calloused, beaten and hardened after hundreds of years of use. The edges leave a delightful tingle against Joe’s skin. His lips part just a little. His breaths turn ragged. “You’re here?” Nicky asks again. His palm tugs a little against Joe’s chest. He relinquishes it. Sorry to see it go. But it only leads to Nicky moving it to mirror its brother. Cupping his face, framing it within his grasp. 

Joe breathes in deep. He speaks. “I’m here.” 

Then Nicky falls forward. He throws himself into Joe’s grasp. His knees straddle Joe’s waist and he clings to him like a child. He sobs, openly and loudly, snot and tears staining Joe’s shoulder. But Joe clings back just as desperately. He squeezes Nicky tight and he cries wetly into Nicky’s shoulder as well. 

Joe’s muscles ache pleasantly as he embraces his love. Every pain is another reminder that he’s alive. Alive and in the arms of the man he loves. He kisses Nicky’s cotton clad shoulder. A bit of blood touches his lips, but he ignores it. It’s worth it. Worth it to press his lips to this body. To hold him and be held in turn. 

“You’re here?” Nicky asks, jerking back to double check that the face of the man he’s holding has not changed. Joe smiles as best he can. 

“I’m h-here. I’m here and I’m not-not- _not_ going anywhere.” 

He shuffles so he can lean against the bed, Nicky’s legs sprawl out to one side and his head rests against Joe’s neck. His left hand squeezes tight to Joe’s shirt. “You’re here?”

“I’m here.” A part of him thrills at the asking. Because the answer is the same every time. The answer is simple and honest and _perfect._ “I’m here,” he says. There is no place else he would rather be. 

* * *

It’s hours before Joe sees anyone else again. 

Nicky’s fallen asleep in his arms. His grip is a bit looser, now, but still there. His breathing slow and steady. Joe practices drawing breaths in tandem to his beloved. Nicky’s never been a particularly immovable bed partner. He kicks in his sleep. Twitches. Once, he elbowed Joe clear in the eye. Another time, he’d had a nightmare bad enough that when Joe tried to wake him, he got throat-shotted for the effort. But now, he’s perfectly still. A heavy weight that seems to have just cut all ties to the waking world. Joe presses kisses to Nicky’s pretty hair, snuggling his nose against Nicky’s crown as he relishes the feeling of Nicky’s body against his. 

When Andy knocks, she does so light and gentle. She peers inside and doesn’t seem the least bit surprised to find them in each other’s arms on the floor. She sits on the bed, though. Her knees by Joe’s head. “It’s...damn good to see you again Joe,” she whispers. Nicky hadn’t so much as twitched at her appearance. Joe runs a hand along his side, relishing the warmth emanating beneath his touch. 

“Where’s...Quynh?” Joe asks, soft and slow. He kisses Nicky’s hair. 

“Booker and Nile have her tied up downstairs.” She says it like a fact, without emotion or platitudes. “We’re trying to figure out what to do with her.” 

It’s a conversation that he and Nicky should be a part of. He knows that. He does. But he can’t imagine himself a part of that conversation right now. And Nicky...he’s not _equipped_ to handle that conversation right now. “We’re...going...going to-to leave,” Joe says. They hadn’t talked about it. Hadn’t made any plans. Their only communication had consisted of endless affirmations. When Nicky fell asleep it had happened because a year of stress had built into an explosion against Quynh and the aftermath had drained his body of everything he had left to keep it moving. His eyes had fluttered without his permission, and he’d lost consciousness between one affirmation and the next. 

“Joe?” Andy asks slowly. 

“We’re...going to-to _leave,_ Andy.” He forces himself not to tense at the loathsome feeling in his mouth. The stumbling of his tongue. He can feel the words pressing out against the back of his teeth. Loitering right there waiting to be breathed out properly into the world. He can feel the sentence filtering down from his brain and into his mouth, ready to be spoken. And he feels it when his throat clenches down, his vocal chords spasm, and his words emerge stilted and wrong. 

“Just...the two of you?” 

“I don’t know.” He gets it all out properly. Kisses Nicky’s hair as a reward. “Book can-can come. Nile…” He closes his eyes. “I don’t know. You need-need them. Need them for her. Don’t you?” She doesn’t seem to know what to say. He tilts his head back to look at her. “Book...Book told me what’s been-been happening.” 

“I didn’t condone it.” 

Nicky’s fingers twitch at his collar. He adjusts his hold, keeping him steady and secure. He says, “I know...that. Still...happened. Still...needs figuring out. And we—” Nicky’s head moves. He shifts with greater purpose, and Joe grimaces. Nicky’s awake. They woke him up. He leans back in Joe’s arms, blinking owlishly about the room. Taking in the angle of the sun and Andy on the bed. His long hair has tangled and flattened at one side. The other, Joe’s been petting so much it’s knot free and calm. “Was...telling Andy...we were gonna leave.”

“Together?” it comes out too breathless and too fast to be driven by anything other than panic. 

Joe grimaces, gives Nicky a squeeze. “Yeah, t-together.” 

“All right.” 

“Do you want...Book...or Nile to come-come- _come_ with us?” 

Nicky doesn’t react physically, doesn’t so much as blink as a tell, and yet he says: “They would like that,” and Joe knows, like he knows his own mind, that it’s a misdirection. It’s the truth, but it gives the appearance of a lie. Joe can’t remember the last time Nicky actively lied to him. 

“We’ll go alone,” he says. Nicky blinks. Frowns. Looks at him. “Tell me-tell me you _want_ them to c-come.” He doesn’t. Just stares at Joe. Stares and stares and stares. Joe wonders if he’ll reach out again, touch his face. Ask _You’re here?_ He prepares his response. But Nicky is silent. 

“Where?” Andy asks. 

Joe thinks of the Briar Patch, but shakes the idea loose almost immediately. They don’t bring their messes home. The Briar Patch is for when they need reminders, not when they need healing. Comfort. A return. “Malta?” Joe asks Nicky. His fingers trace Nicky’s throat. He can feel the strong beats of Nicky’s heart thump against his fingers. 

It’s steady and calm when he says: “Yes.” Joe nods and gives Nicky a little bit of a nudge. He folds willingly, returning to his position at Joe’s neck. 

“Do what you...what you want, Andy. But we...we’re leaving.” 

“For how long?” 

He almost laughs, but it isn’t really funny. “How...ever long it takes.” She doesn’t ask any other questions. Joe feels a pang in his chest. He just got home. He wants to be with Booker and Nile. With Andy. Wants to feel their comfort and their kindness. Wants to stay with them, heal with them. 

But he can’t. Not like this. Not right now. He has no intentions of dealing with Quynh until he knows everything. But he knows Nicky can’t stay in this house. Not with her. And he won’t be parted from Nicky. Not again. So they’re leaving. They have to leave. “I’ll get a car ready,” Andy says. Because they’ll need to leave soon, or it’ll be pointless. Joe nods. Weary and exhausted. He closes his eyes and puts all of his attention on the feeling of Nicky’s body against his. 

They’ll get through this. 

After all, they always do. 

***End Part One***

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Regarding the Trigger Warning for this chapter: Upon confirmation Joe is alive and in the apartment, Nicky releases a year's worth of pent up anger on Quynh. It is extraordinarily bloody in response. This is in no way meant to glorify violence against women, nor is this an appropriate response in general. This moment, and its repercussions for Nicky, will be discussed in depth moving forward. 
> 
> ALSO - there is a brief racially charged moment between Quynh and Nile where Quynh intimates that Nile would know what it's like to be a slave. 
> 
> Thank you to everyone for reading this fic, I'm beyond delighted by the response. As I prepare for Part II, please note that the chapter updates will slow down just a bit. I will try to do once a week no matter what, but I need to focus on my thesis and most likely can't commit to an every day schedule. Thanks for your understanding!


	8. Chapter 8 (Start of Part Two)

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Content warning: Graphic depictions of violence, nightmares, and sexual activity  
> Rating for THIS chapter: E

Nicky dreams of sand. 

It spins through the air in great beige tufts, blinding him as he walks across sun cracked clay. He hears the sounds of conflict, the shouts of crusaders as they drive their horses into the saracen armies. He can’t see them though. All around him is just sand and clay. The air is thick with the smell of the earth. The wind blows harsh against his skin and he shields his eyes with the flat of his hand. 

He hears hooves beating loud behind him. He steps to the side to avoid getting trampled. But the horse isn’t there. Nothing is there. Just an empty desert filled with the ghosts of the past. Blinking stupidly at the endless land, Nicky turns in a circle. He’s almost made it completely around when there’s a body in front of him. A curved blade raised. Nicky throws his arms up. A sword is in his hand. He blocks the first blow and stumbles backward under the force of it. 

He blinks, trying to understand. The blade comes back around. Stabbing and slashing with murderous intent. He blocks, parries, side steps. The pattern seems familiar. He strikes forward and finally gets a look at his attacker.

Quynh. 

Rage builds within him. He shifts his stance and attacks with a relish. The weight of his sword beats against her smaller blade. She’s on the defensive. He batters against her attempts to protect herself. He slices cruelly at her hand. She drops her sword. He stabs her between her ribs and when she falls—he goes to his knees at her side. His sword is now a chef’s knife. He lifts it up and brings it down hard on her face. 

Only, it’s not Quynh’s eyes that stare up at him in stunned disbelief. It’s Joe. Joe as he first met him. When they lost themselves in attempt after attempt to kill one another. "Stop...killing me..." Joe says.

“No,” Nicky breathes out. The knife falls from Nicky’s hand. His fingers press against the wound he’d made. Joe’s skin cracks and splinters beneath his touch. Nicky jerks back. More wounds start to appear. Echoes from years past. Joe’s face breaks in pieces, blood streams down into the hot clay. His nose crushes itself. His eyes are little more than bloody holes. 

Nicky shakes his head. Throws himself forward in desperation, pressing at the wounds. “Stop, stop, stop, I didn’t mean it. Stop.” He tries to piece the face back together, but his efforts only seem to encourage more of Joe’s fracturing descent. He feels the bones breaking under his palms. Joe’s brain as it’s finally shattered free from the skull Nicky destroyed over nine hundred years ago. “I didn’t mean it, stop. Please. Please, I didn’t mean it.” 

Something sharp and painful strikes him in the back. 

He wakes up as the blows continue to fall. Gasping into the half-dark of their bedroom. 

Strikes continue to land. Once, twice, three times. Nicky jerks when the fourth hits. He rolls forward, off the bed with a crash. His back screams in agony. Nausea spirals around his stomach, though he can’t tell if it’s from the beating or the dream. He looks up. Joe’s still asleep. A nightlight illuminates his face, his body. He's striking rhythmically with his right fist tucked close to his side. Punch. Punch. Punch. Punch. 

The nausea is becoming too much to ignore. Nicky drags himself up, bracing against the bedside table as he finds his feet. They feel wobbly and unsteady beneath him. Even so, he commands them forward. He trips and teeters the whole way, but eventually makes it to the bathroom. There, he coughs up thick yellow bile into the toilet. It takes a long time for it to stop. 

Even longer for the pain in his back to right itself. To heal as if there was nothing there at all. Nicky almost laughs at the simplicity of it all. He doesn’t. Instead, he leans against the wall in front of the toilet, runs his hand through his long hair, and tries to think. 

The nightmare sits like a physical weight on his tongue. He can feel it with each breath. Taste it behind the lingering flavor of sick that he desperately needs to wash out. Grunting, Nicky stands. He leans heavily on the bathroom counter. Flicking on the water, he waits for it to run truly cold before he cups his hands beneath the faucet and brings his lips down to slurp. He swirls the water in his mouth and spits, then repeats the process a few more times before splashing his face in a vague attempt at washing it. 

The bathroom light turns on between one splash and the next. He flinches as the intrusion, but looks up to meet Joe’s worried eyes. “Hey,” he greets quietly. Joe’s frowning at him. 

“You...all...all right?” he asks.

“Fine,” Nicky replies. Joe frowns even deeper. He glances at the toilet. Nicky hadn’t flushed it. His sick remains putrid and dark; the air around them grows rancid with its presence. Irritated at his own failings, Nicky depresses the lever and sends the mess as far away as he can send it. 

“What hap-hap-hap,” Joe closes his eyes, takes a deep breath. Tries again: “ _Happened?”_

“Bad dream.” The blows to his kidney hadn’t helped, but the more awake he is the more Nicky’s certain it’d been the dream that caused _this_ particular reaction. His fingers twitch from the feeling of trying to hold Joe’s face together. Trying to undo what he did. The longer the sensation lasts, the more a _different_ desire grows. He gives in, turning on the faucet again so he can wash his hands. 

Joe watches him the whole time. He’s not judgmental. Not sneering or glowering at Nicky in the least. If anything, he appears concerned. Nicky hates that just as much. There’s nothing for Joe to be concerned about. Nothing he should be worrying for. Turning off the faucet, Nicky stares down at his wet hands. They’re clean, but the water aggravates his skin. Joe’s already passing him a small towel by the time he goes to look for one. “Want...to tell...me abou-ou-out _it?”_ Joe asks, nose scrunching at the stumble. 

“I killed you,” Nicky says. 

“Many times,” Joe teases. It’s meant to be a tease. It burns hot and heavy in Nicky’s chest. He glares at Joe, throws the towel at him and marches back to their bedroom. The covers are a mess. There’s sweat staining their sheets from their failed attempt at sleep. Joe must not have put the towel away properly because he’s there in an instant. One hand around Nicky’s wrist, pulling him back to face him. “Sorry- _sorry._ It was...a joke.” 

He knew that. Knew it when Joe said it. It didn’t matter then, and it doesn’t matter now. Nicky twists his wrist free and crosses his arms in front of his chest. “I don’t think it’s funny. Killing you.” 

“No-no I know. S-s-s- _sorry._ Nick-Nicky, I’m so s-s-sorry.” As his frustration mounts, his stuttering gets worse. He reaches out to touch Nicky’s arms but Nicky steps back. Away. He doesn’t want to be touched right now. Can’t fathom the feel of someone else’s hands on his skin. Even if it’s Joe’s. Joe stands there, hands outstretched, pain clear on his features. “Tell-tell me what hap-hap-happened. In...in your dr-eam.” The last word he drags out, forcing it to take shape despite his body’s attempts at stifling it. 

“It doesn’t matter,” Nicky says. He glances at the clock near the bed. Four AM. He knows he won’t be able to fall back to sleep, but he doesn’t know what to do with himself now. It’s too early to make breakfast. He doesn’t think he can manage holding his sword to train with it. Perhaps a book. But no, thinking of books makes him think of his brother...and the gift that he’d been given before they left for Malta. A gold-edged copy of _One Thousand and One Nights_ with an inscription that read: _you deserve kindness too._ It had rested, untouched, on Nicky’s nightstand since the day they’d unpacked. Nicky didn’t want to read that. He didn’t want to read anything. 

Joe runs his hands over his face, smoothes out his hair, and taps his palms to his cheeks in order to wake himself up properly. “Wa-walk?” he asks. 

“Sure.” A walk sounds fine. They dress, slowly, pulling on their sneakers and donning light sweaters to fight against the predawn chill. 

They walk west together. This too is a routine. Neither needs to offer it to the other, their feet simply maneuver them onto the right road and they keep going until it’s time to step out onto the rocky plains leading to the Dingli cliffs. The sun chases their backs as they walk. Their shadows grow long as they move. Sunsets here are some of the most beautiful in the world, but sunrises have their own charm. 

Shore birds mosey about, calling to one another as day breaks on the island. Wings flutter and the late night insects scurry back into the dirt until sun down. There’s an observatory not far away. Several old churches that survive by tenacity and stewardship alone. Nicky and Joe don’t stop at any of these. Their destination is a small bench that overlooks the sea. A view that stretches outwards and dares the human eye to imagine anything at all living beyond the horizon. 

The ground is uneven. Joe holds out his hand, and Nicky takes it as he always does. Is charmed, as he always is, by Joe’s constant patience and forethought. They can’t die, but they still hurt. Neither cares much for twisted ankles or broken bones. And even if the touch is slight, Joe pulls away once Nicky’s steady, it’s a slow and subtle rebuilding of Nicky’s desire to even feel him again. 

When they reach the bench, they sit, and Nicky’s leg presses against Joe’s. Joe’s arm wraps around his shoulder. Nicky’s head tucks into Joe’s neck. They watch the world grow light around them, and listen as the birds sing. “It was when we first met,” Nicky says, unprompted but so very tired. Joe’s arm is a soothing weight. His thumb strokes back and forth on Nicky’s shoulder. He’s quiet and patient, and doesn’t press for more. “Except, I was fighting Quynh. I killed her. I went to hurt her like at the safe house. But she...when I stabbed her, it was you. What I did to you. That last time.” 

“It’s...similar,” Joe concedes. The connection isn’t that far away. Nicky had destroyed Joe’s face and body as best as he’d been able, and then been horrified as it pieced itself back together again in front of his eyes. Just as Quynh had done. Only, he hadn’t seen her rebuild herself. That was a sight for Andy, Nile, and Booker alone. “I hit-hit- _hit_ you.” It isn’t a question, but it feels like one. 

Nicky sighs. “Joe…”

“I did. I woke...up becau-because I couldn’t feel it when-when you left. The th-th-th- _thing_ I was hit..ting in my sleep. I punched and-and _rolled_ over. Woke up. You were g-g- _gone._ ” With each fumbled word, Joe’s grip on Nicky’s shoulder grew marginally tighter. His distress seeping off him in waves. 

“I wanted to wake up, anyway. It doesn’t matter.” 

“It…” he sighs, takes a deep breath and releases some of the pressure on Nicky’s arm. He takes a few moments then speaks again. “It matters to _me,_ Nicky.” 

Nicky gives his knee a squeeze. _Good job._ He gets a kiss on the side of his head for the silent praise. A cormorant takes off from the cliff to the right. It flaps its mighty wings a few times then soars out of sight beneath the cliff edge. “I've hit you before...in my sleep.” 

Joe nuzzles against his hair. His nose pokes at Nicky’s ear. His other arm comes around to complete his embrace. “And I hol-hold y-you to keep you st- _ill.”_ Another kiss. Then, sadder, “I don’t...don’t want-t-t to hur-hur- _hurt_ you.” 

“You woke me up from a dream I did not want. I do not hurt anymore.” 

“You c-could hold me?” Joe offers. Nicky tilts his head back to scowl at him. 

“Then it’ll be _your_ kidneys I hit, Joe.” Joe’s hopeful expression turns somber. He apologizes and Nicky turns away. Back to the sea and the birds and the fresh new light of the sun. “Don’t think of it, please.” 

It wasn’t the first time he woke up like that. In the few weeks since they arrived in Malta, it’d been an almost nightly occurrence. Joe slept fitfully, and almost religiously struck out in steady beating jolts that beat painfully along Nicky’s back. He can imagine the reason. Has no desire to hear it spoken aloud. Most nights, he’ll shift just enough that it won’t matter. He’ll tuck in under Joe’s arms so when the movement starts it doesn’t hit him so much as slide over his body. He barely gets any rest like that, but he wouldn’t get any regardless. Sleep’s a phantom thing. Happening on its own terms, rarely on his own. Giving dreams whether he yearns for them or not.

He laughs at the thought, a short huffing breath that leaves his nose unbidden. Joe makes a questioning sound. “Nothing,” he refutes. “It’s nothing important.” 

Nicky doesn’t like lying to Joe. It grates against his skin, turning him rough and ragged. The guilt compounds within him until he feels compelled to speak the truth. Fall to his knees. Beg for forgiveness. But sometimes, lies are kinder than the truth. Gentler. Nicky closes his eyes and relishes the shape of Joe’s body against his. “Are you real?” he asks softly. 

Joe mishears, or deliberately doesn’t answer. He hugs Nicky tighter and says. “I’m here.” It isn’t what Nicky meant, but it will do for now. He leans into the warmth of Joe’s body, listening to his heart beating soundly beneath his ear. 

They sit like that until the sun rises high in the morning sky. Someone is walking the cliffside with their fluffy dog, who sees Joe and Nicky and runs over for a pet. They make their greetings and say their goodbyes, walking back home as the cliffs become more active.

It’s a long walk, but it’s worth it. They don’t have anything to say, so they walk in silence. Joe’s hand around Nicky’s. Warm and ever-present. It’s a good dream, Nicky thinks. Out loud he asks Joe if he wants something to eat, and he moves to the kitchen to cook. 

* * *

If pressed, Nicky couldn’t explain how they actually arrived in Malta. Leaving the safe house, boarding a plane-all these things had to have happened logistically, but they blurred around him in timeless snippets that provided no context or explanation. He felt, for the most part, that it had just happened. That from one moment to the next he’d been transplanted, Joe holding onto him the whole while. 

The house hadn’t been touched in years. The generator that allowed them to keep off the grid was out of gas, and spiders had taken over whole rooms. A few windows were broken and a storm seemed to have destroyed what had once been a wildflower garden that made up the small fenced in yard behind the house. 

Unable to sleep, Nicky had dedicated himself to cleaning the bedroom well enough for them to actually use it. Joe lay curled up on the sofa as he worked, breathing deep and snuggling into the velvety warmth of a sweatshirt Nicky provided care of Booker’s packing. It’d been in that same suitcase that he found _One Thousand and One Nights._ Joe never asked about it, and Nicky didn’t tell him. 

It wasn’t something he knew how to put into words anyway. 

The days that followed were slow. Someone, Nile, Nicky thought at the time, called them in a food delivery and groceries were dropped off in their kitchen in all their prepaid glory. Shelves stocked and generator full, there'd been no need to go out- so they hadn’t. 

They woke up, worked on the house in quiet companionship, ate infrequently, slept far more frequently, and very rarely actually spoke. The longest conversation they’d had was on the clifftop that morning, and Nicky still doesn’t know what he thinks about it. 

Joe’s frustration with his stuttering ebbs and flows in waves. Sometimes he’s pleased he’s managing, other times it gnaws at him with vicious teeth and hateful thoughts. He touches his lips more often than not, as though he could pluck the words straight from his tongue and fling them into the air. 

For his part, Nicky couldn’t care less about the stuttering. His only compunction in the matter is that Joe had been put in a position where the result _was_ stuttering. But _Joe_ despises how he sounds now and seems to actively avoid long conversations if he can manage it. Shame grips at him and Nicky has never known how to cast off the yoke of shame. It’s had its claws in Nicky from the moment he’d been born and called a bastard. If he knew what foil to wield against Shame’s dogged cries, he’d stab it to pieces. He doesn’t. So they don’t speak. 

Not unless they _have_ to, and both of them have become resoundingly good at avoiding anything that they _have_ to do. 

Booker and Nile phone in once a day to check on them, and they take turns at it because Nicky and Joe don’t always answer the phone. They let it go to voicemail, listen, and send back texts when they feel like it. 

Shame takes up a new banner in both Booker and Nile’s name just to instill perpetual guilt in Nicky for abandoning them to Quynh. When he cooks, he feels Shame’s presence in every slice he makes on the cutting board, reminding him that at this very moment—they’re in a house catering to Quynh’s whims. 

Because the answer to the question: what to do with an insane immortal, had simply been: there’s nothing one _can_ do to an insane immortal. 

Without revealing who and what they are, they cannot inter Quynh anywhere. Without risking exposure, they can’t hire someone to monitor her. Without damning what’s left of their souls, they cannot return her to the sea to face an endless torment that would destroy their own concepts of sanity along with hers. Even the men who threw her in to begin with likely thought she would die down there. Nicky doubts they imagined her beating away at the lid of a coffin for all time. Some had been mere boys, following the crooked orders of their superiors. Who were they to understand the concept of immortal punishment? 

Quynh is not Prometheus, and they are not gods. They cannot tie her to a rock to be tortured for all time. So instead, they must mitigate her at all times. Place her under eternal house arrest, with them as her jailers. 

Copley’s arranging for a more permanent location based off of Andy’s recommendations. Nicky had laughed when he heard the terms she’d set. They’d been more cruel than Nicky thought Andy capable of bequeathing to Quynh. She asked for an island. An island out of sight from everyone. An island where Quynh, like Circe, would face punishment by an enforced isolation overseen only by her brethren. They’d give her a house, a home, and supervision only in the most abstract sense. Copley would serve as the panopticon overseer, watching from cameras and viewpoints in case she attempted to flee. 

Nicky knows she won’t flee. Quynh won’t touch that water. Unless a vessel comes across her, she’ll be stranded and alone. With only herself to blame. It’s cruel, and they’ve kept that cruelty from Quynh as far as Nicky knows. They’ll only tell her when they secure the right location. And so for now, she’s simply under their watchful eyes. Waiting for the moment that the plug is pulled and she is flushed down the drain she built on her own. 

The knife slips in Nicky’s hand, slicing sharply against his index finger. Blood wells instantly beneath the blade. He hisses, bringing the cut to his mouth to suck on the wound as he stares down at the onions he’d been chopping. He’d been getting lazy, not curling his fingers in appropriately. Still, it doesn’t seem like he’s dribbled too much blood on the food. He plucks a few of the most offending pieces out of the way, tossing them into the compost bin with a practiced aim.

He’s about to go back to chopping when Joe plucks his finger from between his lips and transfers it to his own mouth. “That’s unsanitary,” Nicky says, setting his knife back down and twisting to watch Joe work. Joe’s tongue presses against the healed skin of Nicky’s finger, lavishing it with such attention that he’s tipped from romantic into the obscene. 

For the first time in a while, a genuine smile grows on Nicky’s face. He wiggles his finger in Joe’s mouth, playfully fighting against the tongue that chases it until Joe steps in close and withdraws the finger in order to steal a kiss instead. His beard scratches against Nicky’s face. Nicky sighs into the feeling, closing his eyes as Joe’s hands stroke down the sides of his body. “Okay?” Joe asks. 

“Okay,” Nicky replies. Joe’s hands turn more insistent. They’re almost massaging they spend so long squeezing and rubbing at Nicky’s muscles. He slumps a bit against the counter, eyes fluttering as Joe kisses him. Touches him. 

“Can I?” Joe asks against his mouth, not pulling away properly to fully speak. One of his hands has dropped between Nicky’s legs, grinding against his groin with practiced familiarity. Nicky groans. 

“Haven’t...since we last…” He grits out. He means it as a warning, but Joe apparently takes it as a challenge. He grins so savagely against Nicky’s lips that Nicky’s head spins. Joe drops to his knees, mouthing at Nicky’s length through his pants. Nicky’s legs tremble, he grips the counter to stay standing, sucking in huge gulps of air as Joe paws at his belt and untucks him. 

Nicky’s hard. It’s embarrassing how hard he is from such little contact, but he’s nearly weeping as Joe takes him into his mouth. Nicky’s head throws back. His hips pump once and he’s done. Joe’s fingers have barely had time to start playing with his balls by the time he’s spent himself. And yet despite the disappointment Joe must be feeling at so quick an exchange, he suckles on Nicky’s cock until there’s not a drop left inside him, pulls back and grins with so conceited a grin that Nicky pushes his face a little. “Don’t give me that look,” he mumbles, blushing hard enough he could light a room from his face alone. 

“You _liiiike_ me,” Joe drawls. It isn’t even a stumble this time, it’s a fully intentional tease that sends prickles of delight star-bursting all across Nicky’s scalp. He mumbles a cruse under his breath, a few uncharitable words to the man who turned him on and had him finishing in less than five minutes by mere teasing alone. “You think I’m _sexy,”_ Joe sings, tucking Nicky back in his pants, petting his shrinking penis with such tender affection Nicky shoves him again. 

“Stop,” he laughs, not really meaning it. 

“You think I’m g-gorge _-ous._ ” He starts to stand, kissing his way up Nicky’s stomach to Nicky’s neck where he lavishes open mouthed affection to all of Nicky’s available skin. 

Nicky giggles, pushing him away with increasingly less effective attempts. Joe nips at his skin, gets back to his mouth and delivers a far more sincere token of his appreciation on Nicky’s lips. “You...you _love_ me.” He says, smiling as he looks at Nicky. 

“More than anything,” Nicky sighs. It’s the response that ruins things. It’d come unthinkingly to his tongue, but now that it’s there, he grimaces. Joe feels the change immediately, his touch turning uncertain where once it’d been confident and controlled. 

“Nicky?”

He’d been ready to do anything, _anything,_ to get Joe back. “I would have fucked Quynh for you,” he says, blunt and uncompromising. Joe doesn’t pull away, just steps closer. Kisses the side of his face. Holds him between his hands like something gentle and precious. 

“Book-Booker t-told me. I would-would- _would_ have too, Nicolo.” Nicky flinches. Jerks against the counter. He stares at Joe, wide eyed and dumb. He opens his mouth, but no words come out. He shakes his head, uncomprehending. Certain he must have heard wrong. “I’d have fucked her. Bent her over what-whatever sh-sh-sh- _she_ wanted. Licked her til she... _cried,_ and let her have ev-ev-every part of what only be-belongs to _you._ You think I’m ma-mad? At... _you?_ For what sh-sh-sh- _fucking hell-_ sh-sh-sh.” He stops, glowering at something in the middle distance, takes a deep breath, then says “She. Mad at you. For what she did?” 

“Not mad,” Nicky corrects. He didn’t think Joe would be mad at him. The revelation that Joe knows doesn’t even really surprise him. Booker _would_ be the one to tell Joe. Considering how they left each other that day, Booker had every reason to tell Joe. “Disappointed, maybe.”

“Sad,” Joe corrects. He runs his hands up Nicky’s sides, cradles Nicky’s face. “Sad you w-w-w.” He closes his eyes, his lips move soundlessly. Eyes still closed, he says “Were put in that po-si-tion.” He opens his eyes again. He takes a pointedly long breath, holds it for a moment, lets it out, then does it again. Finally, he says, “Sad you never got a chance to s-ay, _no._ To...anything.” 

Tears press against Nicky’s lashes. He curls forward a little, burying his brow against Joe’s shoulder. “I don’t know if I went to sleep,” he says. He can’t look at Joe as he says this. “After. After Booker left. I lay down. I thought, I thought I’d just lay there. I’d think of you, of what I lost because Booker interrupted us. I didn’t know you’d be back the next day. I just, I was tired. And Nile came in, and I don’t know if I went to sleep. Because it was morning, it was morning and you were there, and it feels like a dream. Like I dreamed of you coming home because I just-just couldn’t do it anymore. And I missed you so much. I just wanted you home. I need you to be real, Yusuf. I need you to be here, but I need you to be _real._ ”

Joe's arms wrap around Nicky so fast and so tight it knocks the breath out of him. He sags into the embrace, clinging to the man he’s loved for hundreds of years. “I’m...real,” Joe swears. “I’m real. I’m here. And I’m real.” 

“How do I know?” 

Joe laughs. He pulls back. “Be-because you’d never thin-thin-think of me with a stutter.” 

And it’s undeniably cruel to laugh in the face of Joe’s trauma, but he can’t help it. Nicky laughs, and Joe laughs, and they lean against each other, laughing and crying as the onions lay bloodied and forgotten behind them. Booker calls for his daily check up, but neither pay it any mind. They keep laughing. 

It’s not a dream, but Nicky thinks it might be something better. After all, it's real.


	9. Chapter 9

One bad rainstorm puts an end to the dilly-dallying way Joe and Nicky have been managing the house repairs. A crack of thunder and lightning smashes just above their heads and the roof starts to leak in their bedroom not long after. Joe wakes up to Nicky thrashing upwards, cursing so hard in his first tongue that it takes Joe a few minutes to understand the problem. Water had begun drizzling straight on to their, well, _Nicky’s_ face as they slept. There’d been no saving it either. He drags the bed out of the way as Nicky stomps into the kitchen to find a pot. He slams it onto the ground beneath the leak and glowers as it in petulant irritation. 

“Didn’t think the roof was bad too,” Nicky grits out as water positively _streams_ into the pot. 

“I b-b-blame the D-D-Dimarcos. They didn’t fix...fix it right. Last time.”

“The Dimarcos were three hundred years ago, Joe.” 

“No!”

“Yes. The Dimarcos were the ones with the,” he waves toward his chin, miming the unfortunate shaving convention the whole family had taken on as their personal statement. It had been a truly poor decision, one that gave them all a nefarious kind of expression. Though both Nicky and Joe _had_ been disturbingly amused by the youngest Dimarco whose beard hadn’t quite grown in properly and instead took on a patchwork kind of appearance that yearned for more maleficence than it could manage on his chin. “Chandler did it last.” 

Joe wracks his brains but can come up with no face to match the name. He looks the love of his life in the eye and asks, as delicately as he can, “Wh-wh-who the- _fuck-_ is Chandler?” 

Nicky’s been holding his hand under the stream of water as Joe thought. Letting it drip onto his fingers like an open tap. He flicks it into the bucket and gives Joe a look that seems to imply he should have remembered this particular contractor above all others. “Chandler Garcia? Sofia’s nephew? He was staying with her for the summer in ‘98. We gave him two hundred euro to fix this.”

“I don-don-don’t remember this.” 

“That’s because the whole time you were lying in the bedroom saying _Nicolo, hurry up the roof can wait I’ve been waiting centuries for you._ And you would not stop until I came.” He fumbles with the phrasing, blushing at his own innuendo that Joe can’t help but wink at. Still, _that_ memory starts to come back with more clarity. He’d wanted to spend days in bed doing nothing but memorizing the feel of Nicky’s body, and Nicky _had_ been obnoxiously preoccupied with something else in the middle of it all. It’d been his greatest delight when he finally managed to convince Nicky to leave the roof (and apparently Chandler) in order to cater to his much more desperate needs. 

Sniffing, Joe crosses his arms over his chest and says, “I don’t re-re-rememb-ber you com-compla—” Deep breath. “Complaining.” 

“I was until I wasn’t. But I am now.” He frowns at the leak. “I wonder if it’s a structural problem.” 

“I can-can fix it.” Nicky looks distinctly unimpressed by that. He raises one perfect eyebrow. It is almost hidden behind the fringe of his pretty hair. 

He continues to look unimpressed the next morning when Joe unearths a ladder that’s likely older than Chandler is now and hoists it into the dilapidated garden so he can inspect the roof. Nicky paces about underneath the ladder, grumbling just quietly enough that Joe can’t hear his words but _can_ make out the intent. 

“I can h- _hear_ you worrying,” he huffs, clambering up onto the flat of the roof. 

“You’re standing on the edge of a roof, Joe.” 

“And you-you- _you’re_ stand-ing in my kumquats.” Joe casts a glance over to watch Nicky poke at a wilted stem of a tree that might have lived and died only as a weed. He nudges it a few times as if it might spring back to life, and when it doesn’t he sighs. 

By now it’s clear he’s missed the reference, and Joe needs to restrain himself with all his power when Nicky sadly informs him, “Your kumquats are very dead, Joe.” He snorts anyway, and goes to inspect the roof. 

It takes him a bit of time to circumnavigate the house from above, but he finds the most likely spot the leak came from in the far back corner. Some of the mortar has peeled up and from a slight erosion over the centuries, he can just make out how water has slid into one point in particular. “I f-found it!” The ladder makes a loud clattering sound as Nicky ascends, grumbling about needing to update with the times, stewing mad for reasons Joe can’t comprehend. He points to his masterfully discovered spot and Nicky frowns his thinking frown. 

He kneels down and feels the incline with his hand, chewing his bottom lip in consternation. “Do you think just mortar will help?” 

Joe shrugs. Dingli doesn’t get much rain, even if it’s just a patch job they should be more than capable of doing it themselves without needing to hire _Chandler_ and his foolishness. Joe still cannot believe he completely ignored the presence of another person in their home during one of the most blissful moments of his life. It feels strangely intrusive, despite it being so many years later. More to the point, what kind of self-respecting Maltese named their child _Chandler?_

“We should think about getting the roof inspected at some point,” Nicky says. Joe strokes his fingers along Nicky’s arm. It’s shaken off. “You do this every time.” A finger is aimed in his direction, scolding and cruel. “No sex until this roof is fixed.” Joe’s jaw drops. He scrambles for a rebuttal. But Nicky threatens him before he has a chance. “I’ll hire Chandler again.”

“You would...n’t.” The scandal it would cause!

“You said you’ll fix the roof, well fix the roof.”

“Then s-s-sex?” 

Nicky looks up at the sky. He seems to be taking a page out of Joe’s book, breathing in deeply before replying. “If you’re good,” he decrees. Joe grins. He ignores Nicky’s swatting hand and cups the back of Nicky’s neck. He pulls his beloved closer and presses their lips together. 

Whey they part, he uses his most sultry voice to say: “I c-c-can be _very_ g-good.” 

And Nicky, sweet Nicky, kind Nicky, God’s gift to Joe: Nicky, Nicky smiles like a dove and says, “Deal.” Then he stands up and leaves Joe on the roof without so much as a second kiss for goodbye. 

Joe takes his time on the roof. He measures out the area that he needs to cover with the new mortar, and he considers the general defect on its own. The slope of the stones isn’t ideal in the long haul, and Nicky’s probably right. They’ll need a proper contractor to come in and see what can be done about fixing it without damaging the rest of the stones more than necessary. 

By the time Joe makes it to the ground he has a running list of things that he’ll need to buy from the store. Nicky’s still in the garden, poking at the dead plants and looking so disgruntled that Joe needs to stop himself from kissing the frown away. “Wh-wh-what’s wrong?” 

Nicky jumps at the question. Blinking at him as if he hadn’t heard the obnoxious clamor the ladder makes whenever someone so much as _looks_ in its general direction. It’s that more than anything that has Joe calculating all the times he’d thought Nicky seemed off today. “Nic-Nicolo?” 

“It’s nothing, you need to go get the mortar?” 

“Y-yes.”

“Let’s go.” Nicky brushes past him, ignoring Joe’s outstretched hands entirely. Joe hurries to catch up with him, calling his name as best he can. Most of the time they even came out right, no hitching stumbles involved. 

“Nicolo…” Joe doesn’t know what to say. He trails off, taking in the increasingly rigid posture and the tight expression mars his face in the most unpleasant way. Nicky keeps his back slightly turned even as he finally mutters out a response. 

“I thought you might have been underwater. When the water hit my face, I dreamed...I _thought..._ I...it just made me think something not true. I’ll be fine. Let’s get the mortar.”

It occurs to Joe that the reason it took him so long to realize what Nicky was feeling, was because Nicky so rarely seethes around him. He gets angry, certainly. They’ve argued and fought with one another for centuries from the smallest offense to the largest of failings. But this quiet rage isn’t what Joe’s used to. Nicky’s never hidden his anger, never tried to pass it off as something else or ignore it. He’s bit and cursed and thrown fits that could make a cat envious, but he’s never held it in. 

“Spar with me?” he asks. Nicky’s eyes narrow.

“No.” Joe half remembers a story Booker told him on the plane. How Quynh had killed Nicky in a sparring match. That Nicky hasn’t sparred with anyone since. 

_“Train_ with me then.” He whirls on his feet. They have swords here somewhere. He’s certain they do. Probably in one of the holds in case looters came while they were away. Joe goes to the basement, throwing open the door and going double time down the stairs. He’s standing at the bottom when it occurs to him that the basement light is controlled by a string dangling from the ceiling in the pitch black of the room. They usually have flashlights for when they need to come down here, and had never bothered to make an upgrade because it just hadn’t seemed necessary. 

Standing in the looming darkness, illuminated only by the light from upstairs, Joe curses that decision. He’s frozen, feet stuck in a position they have no business being stuck in. He can’t get himself to step forward or turn back the way he came. He’d come for a reason, but that reason feels petty and foolish considering the fact that he can’t see anything anymore. 

Sweat builds at the back of his neck. He hears something banging loudly, echoing in his ears. His eyes flutter shut. He can’t breathe. He can’t _breathe._ Arms hoist him up. Drag him out of the pit. He’s thrown violently up and up and up until he collapses on the ground and gasps on his knees. Choking for breath as hands pat along his body. Booker - Booker saved him right?

But no, it’s Nicky here. Nicky talking low and fast and panicked. Nicky who’s holding onto his shoulders and crying as he rambles in their first tongues, mixing them so badly it might as well be esperanto for how convoluted they become. He hears one thing though, a persistent command to breathe. 

It’s a good one too, because black spots have started prancing about Joe’s vision. He forces a sweeping breath of air back into his lungs and tries to keep it there for a few moments. Tries to settle the screeching hysteria that one trip down the basement stairs had spawned in him. He clings somewhat childishly to Nicky’s arms the whole while. Until finally, he’s breathing again. In and out. 

“W-w-we sh-sh-should c-c-c-c-call Chand-ler,” Joe sighs. He leans forward and rests his head on Nicky’s shoulder. Defeat swaths through him. He wishes he had more strength. Wishes he could have fixed that damn roof and made love to Nicky as his reward. Right now he’ll take sleeping on the couch and a cold drink over just about anything. 

“I’ll tell him to put in a light switch,” Nicky swears. He sounds more shattered than Joe. Beneath his brow, Joe can feel Nicky’s pulse jolting with anxiety. 

“Get ou-ou-our swords first?” Lips press against Joe’s head and he’s rested against the wall by the basement door as Nicky hurries down the stairs to collect their things. He’s barely gone a full minute before he’s back, weapons tucked under one arm and free hand going to cup Joe’s face in desperation. “St-still here,” Joe whispers. “Help me up?” He feels dizzy. Weak. He’s hoisted up and Nicky lets him lean on him as they navigate back to their pathetic garden of weeds. “Go hit-t-t something,” Joe commands as he sits tiredly on the ground. 

Nicky towers over him. He peers down his nose at Joe and doesn’t seem at all comforted by the order. Even so, Joe knows that Nicky won’t refuse him. Not when he’s sitting here looking like a lost puppy desperate for a home. It takes longer than Joe thought it would, but finally Nicky relents. He places Joe’s blade down at his side with a blasphemous kind of reverence. Then he stands, loops his longsword’s scabbard into position at his waist, and marches out into the weeds. 

They don’t have a name for the forms they use. Some of the techniques have been so wildly modified from their original shape that it’d be disingenuous to call them by any sort of classification. Broadly, Nicky wields a longsword. But he’s long since adopted Joe’s style of fighting, and he’s interwoven techniques more suited for a battle axe or a rapier as well. 

When he trains he swings with all his strength behind his blows, hacking at enemies the size of invisible Goliaths. He stabs as if the fate of the world depends on his completing the move. Joe watches as Nicky fights monsters in their garden. As he swings and slashes and pirouettes around blows only he can see. 

The longer he fights the louder he becomes. Huffing shouts of air leave his lips. His face becomes wild in his agitation. He snarls at his enemies, cutting them down over and over again. Joe hates to admit it, but it was wise not to spar with him. The way they are now, Nicky would never forgive himself for hurting Joe, and Joe doesn’t have it in him to match Nicky’s rage. 

And it _is_ rage. It pours off him faster than the leak over the bed. Rivers shed from his body but keep refilling behind the dam, bursting to be set loose. He fights armies in his mind, and the surging tide of his emotion is enough to drown all in his wake. A mostly dead bush that Joe can’t even remember planting finds itself as the physical embodiment of Nicky’s enemies. 

He hacks at it until there’s nothing left, destroying it in brutal slices that likely leave nicks on his blade. Twigs tumble to the ground as the pure weight of Nicky’s hatred tumbles out of him. Joe breathes for him, in and out slow and steady. He reclaims the level of calm he’d had in the morning when he’d gone to inspect the roof. And when Nicky finally collapses, sweat drenching not only him but the ground beneath him, Joe stands. 

He walks to his beloved. He kneels just behind him, and wraps his arms around Nicky’s body. The sword falls from Nicky’s hands. It clatters to the ground, ignored and unimportant. Nicky’s arms, held firm beneath Joe’s, pull inward. His hands come up and cup around Joe’s. He’s shuddering, crying bitterly at the dirt. 

Joe hums an old song, one from his childhood. He doubts there’s any recorded version of it in the world. But he knows this tune, and he hums it and all its simplicity as he rocks Nicky back and forth. 

“I’m here,” he whispers only when the tears have stopped. “I’m here.” 

“I hate her,” Nicky says. Joe doesn’t think he’s ever seen Nicky truly hate anyone or anything in their long lives together. Even the most atrocious of people, Nicky has managed to pity. “I hate her,” Nicky repeats, as if to convince Joe of this very fact. 

“I know,” Joe says. He kisses the back of Nicky’s neck. “I know. I know.”

* * *

Chandler comes to fix the roof. 

He’d never actually met Joe the first time around, so Joe handles the general meeting and explains what needs to be done. It’s slow and awkward, words tripping over themselves as he tries to get done with it as soon as possible so he can go back to Nicky in the sunroom. He’d finally settled Nicky down to sleep on the sofa, cup of honey and chamomile tea neatly doing the trick. 

Before he can reach Nicky, though, his phone rings. Nile. Sighing, Joe answers. “H-Hey k-kiddo.” 

“Hey Joe,” she greets. “How’s it going?” 

“B-bit of a bad day, ac-actually. N-Nicky’s asleep.”

“He’s taking a nap?” she sounds surprised, and Joe supposes it is surprising. He’s found that Nicky’s sleep habits since they returned have been in constant flux. Sometimes he can’t sleep at all, other times all he wants to do is doze in the warm sun. He never sleeps for long in either case, jolting awake and immediately searching out Joe whose soul responsibility during those moments is to stutter out an _I’m here, I’m real,_ until Nicky calms again. As far as spousal duties are concerned, Joe isn’t too bothered by it in the least. 

He gives Nile a hum of acknowledgment and peers into the sunroom just to see if Nicky’s still where he left him. He is. Curled up with one of Joe’s sweaters co-opted as a pillow. Breathing in his scent on every inhale. “H-how are thing-things w-with Qu-Qu-Quynh?” Joe asks, stepping away from the room so as not to wake Nicky up. 

_“Weird.”_ Nile drags the word out in proper fashion. Grumbling just the right amount. “Sometimes I don’t even know if she realizes what’s going on. She doesn’t try to leave the house or anything. Doesn’t argue with us when we tell her how things are. She just goes along with it. She’s being _annoyingly_ polite too. Which is some bullshit because I didn’t think she even _had_ manners after this last year.” 

He wonders if it would help Nile to know that Joe isn’t all that surprised. It sounded like Quynh. Andy must have already come to that conclusion too if she hadn’t said anything about it to their younger siblings. Quynh has every ability to be a nice person. The fact that she chooses not to be, moore often than not, stems from the fact that she never felt she _needed_ to be. If she’s being kind now, it’s because she knows she has to be kind. 

It won’t erase anyone’s memory of what she did, but it’ll blur the lines. Joe shakes his head. He says, “S-sorry we left you w-with her.” 

“Nah, man, it’s fine. We all get it, you know that right?” 

“Yeah. I know.” It didn’t make him feel much better, but it didn’t hurt either. 

“Anyway, I wanted to tell you—Copley’s got a place in mind. For. You know.” He did. “He’s gonna get us some sedatives so it’s not a pain in the ass to make it happen.” 

“That...that’s prob-probably for th-the best.” 

NIle makes a noise of agreement. Then, quieter, she asks, “Did you want to be there? When we do it? Andy said you might.” He hadn’t considered it before. And in light of Nicky’s explosion today it probably isn’t a good idea, but now that it’s in his mind he can’t seem to shake the allure of it. He hasn’t properly spoken to Quynh since that day in Booker’s apartment. When she gets transferred...he doesn’t know when he’ll speak to her again. 

“L-let me talk to N-Nicky about it. I’ll let...let you know. Okay?” 

“Yeah, sounds good. Look, I gotta go. I was just calling to let you know that and check in...make sure you guys are still alive.” 

“Still alive,” he promises. She laughs a little and they say their goodbyes. 

When he gets back to the sunroom, Nicky is still asleep. Joe pauses only for a moment, then collects a sketchbook and pencil from a nearby bookcase. He settles in across from his beloved, watching as Nicky snuggles even closer to his sweater. Then he sets his pencil to the paper and starts to draw. 

He has a lot to think about, and needs to come up with an answer before Nicky wakes up. Or rather, he needs to come up with a way to explain it before Nicky wakes up. He already knows what he wants to do. 

Above them both, Chandler continues to work, entirely oblivious to the plans being made within.


	10. Chapter 10

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Mental instability, graphic depictions of Quynh's experiences
> 
> Content warning: some first person POV

Andromache tells her Joe was coming to speak with her. Joe. Not ‘Yusuf’ — Joe. She says it in the same kind of defeated monotonous voice that Andy’s been using since Quynh died at Nicolo’s hand. Exhaustion motivating her more than anything else. Quynh responds with the same placidity she’s had since Nicolo killed her too. There’s no use rocking the boat. At this point, the bigger fish is already in the water. It’s better to just wait it out, and hope that she goes unnoticed by it’s searching gaze. 

Despite being informed so succinctly, however, Quynh doubts  _ Joe  _ would actually come. It’s been over a month since she last caught a glimpse of him, standing in the doorway and watching as Nicolo prepared for his slaughter. No one’s deigned to tell her much about Nicolo or  _ Joe  _ since they departed. She’s inquired, of course. She’s asked them if they’re all right. Nile usually glares at her when she does. Always asks,  _ Why do you care?  _ in response. As if Quynh had no reason to be concerned. 

She knows what being separated from the one you love more than yourself is like. She knows how hard it can be. She knows, too, that sometimes coming back together isn’t easy. She once asked Nile, in a question responding to a question responding to another question,  _ why wouldn’t she care?  _ And Nile stormed out of the room, locking Quynh inside without providing any additional information. 

Quynh likes Nile, usually. Likes her strength and her refusal to let Andy come to harm. Likes how she has slowly ingratiated herself into the family. But Nile doesn’t like Quynh, and Quynh knows it takes time for new family members to get used to being around one another. Thankfully time is something they all have plenty of. 

Booker answers Quynh’s questions though. Sometimes. He’s sarcastic and filled with vitriol. A wet cat with sharp claws that never fails to make Quynh smile. She’s so glad the team welcomed him home. No one deserves to be abandoned. And seeing him with them feels so natural. He’s a good brother to have. Even to Quynh, he gives answers instead of run-arounds. When she asks after Nicolo and  _ Joe _ he says things like,  _ They’re dealing with what you did to them.  _ And that’s helpful. Good to know. She thanks him sometimes too, and he snaps out his ‘your welcomes’ with such displeasure that she’s gratified that he has manners despite his surly nature. 

Once a day, Quynh waits for the sound of Nile or Booker to call their brothers. They leave quiet voicemails most of the time, but every so often Quynh can just make out the sounds of a conversation. She listens as they laugh or somberly relay messages. If nothing else, it’s lovely to hear that Nicolo and  _ Joe  _ are all right. 

And yet. None of these phone calls or quiet conversations, nor even the few explanations she gets from Booker are enough to explain why  _ Joe  _ would come to speak with her. It seems illogical to her. 

He had his Nicolo in his arms, why would he return to her instead? If Quynh had the chance to be with Andromache, and only Andromache, she would take that chance and never look back. It would be a balm. A balm that no other salve could overcome.

And  _ yet.  _ He comes despite her disbelief. 

She’s laying on her bed when he comes. He unlocks the door they’ve caged her behind and he steps inside without any weapon or backup. Quynh thinks she hears someone in the hall, but cannot quite tell who it is.  _ Joe  _ closes the door behind him. Whoever is out there locks it, trapping them inside together. 

_Joe_ sits at the desk she’s been provided. He sags into the seat and rests his elbows on his knees, looking at her under the fringe of his curls. Quynh hoists herself up. Swings her legs over the edge of the bed. She sits there, watching him. Looking at him. He’s wearing a sweater, warm and seemingly cozy. 

She reaches out to touch it. Her fingers slide along the cuff of his sleeve, pinching at the fabric. “It’s nice,” she tells him. 

“It...is,” he confirms. He meets her eyes. “Tell...me,” he pauses for a breath, “why.” 

“Where’d you get it?” She asks, still stroking the delectable material. He turns his hand. Shifts so his fingers can wrap around her palm. 

“Tell...me...why.” 

It’s been a long time since anyone’s held her hand. Andromache hasn’t. Not since she came back. It’s hurt too, not having Andromache’s fingers intertwined with her own. She misses it. But  _ Joe  _ has always been good about being kind to her. He’s always let her tease and play with him. Always joined in on the fun. 

He’s the first one who’s asked her without the anger or the fury that marred the rest of the family. The first one who actually seems to want to listen. “How much do you want to know?” she asks. 

“All...of...it.” He speaks slowly. Carefully. Like each word is chosen with the utmost delicacy and precision. His hand is so warm. She kneels before him, rests her head on his let and sighs when he touches the top of her hair. 

Quietly, just between the two of them, Quynh tells her story. 

* * *

When I first went into the water, I didn’t know what to expect. I thought, it would be bad for a while. For a time. I knew it would hurt, of course. How can being drowned over and over be anything less than painful? But the hurt seemed as if it would be secondary for the first few dozen deaths. Over the hurt, there was only fear. A fear of being forgotten, or perhaps more accurately, being left alone. 

I walked this earth for hundreds of years before I met Andromache. I travelled through deserts and open plains. I met countless faces, and I embraced endless deaths at the will of the faces I thought were my friends. I learned, in those years, it was better to be alone than to put your faith in humanity. They disappointed every time. 

But...when Andromache came for me, she made me believe it was possible. That maybe, just maybe, I didn’t have to be alone again. That my eternity could be spent with her. And then—with Lykon. I could be with them, forever, and we could make this world even better by our presence. All those battles we fought, all those wars we waged, I could fight forever so long as they were there. 

When Lykon died...I couldn’t understand it. I couldn’t understand why this curse turned gift had to return back to a curse once more. It wasn’t fair. I had the two people in my life that I loved more than anything. We had you. You and Nicolo. Our sweet little brothers who were so in love and so happy. So why did Lykon have to die? 

Why did any of us have to die? 

And when I first went into that water, that was the question that haunted my waking moments. Death, and being alone. Death in the water is an inevitability. I drowned, and drowned, and drowned some more. Over and over again. It was all my body was capable of doing. Sometimes, I still think it’s the only thing it knows. It dies, and then it wakes up. It is impossible to stop it. It simply  _ is.  _

But being alone...that’s not a choice of the body. That’s a choice of circumstance. I was alone because someone decided I should be. Not me, not even Andromache. Someone else. Some horrible human filth decided that my not dying meant that I should be separated from all the world. Kept from the rest of humanity because I was a monster. 

I’m not a monster, Yusuf. Joe. I’m not. But I felt like one. Lying in that contraption. Trapped in place as fish came through the eyes and mouth of the mask. They bit at me. Ate me. Chewed my flesh while I screamed. I was food for them. For centuries I was a living thing they could eat and lay their waste on. My box was a home for them to birth their eggs in. I was their coral reef. A living thing, only sometimes dead, who provided endless life on the bottom of the ocean floor. 

It didn’t matter that I fought. That I hit at the ceiling of that box time and time again. The chains held it tight and the lock refused to budge. For centuries I tried to stop it. I tried to avoid it. I tried to hold onto the only things that mattered. My family... Andromache, you, and Nicolo. I wondered if Andromache was out there with me, somewhere. Deep in the water so far away, yet so much closer than I imagined. I wondered if you ever knew what happened to us. Or if we'd simply disappeared from your lives forever. 

It comforted me, I think. To know that even if Andromache and I were apart, we still lived the same lives. We still died and woke to the same pain. To the schools of fish making their home in our tombs, and the water that tried to feed us like air. 

But I couldn’t stay awake through all of it. Sometimes it was just too hard to do that. It hurt too much. I hoped...when I buried you, you would do what Nicolo did. What I did for so many years. I hoped you’d just close your eyes, and go to sleep. Because when you sleep, you dream. And the dreams were beautiful, Yusuf. They were perfection. 

I dreamed of us as a family. I dreamed of an end of pain and suffering, and just us. Together. Sharing meals and being happy like we once were. Killing those who needed killing. Saving those who needed saving. And loving those who needed loving. It was the only thing that kept me alive. There. Capable of even regaining the smallest part of who I was. Who I am. 

And then Booker was born. And when I slept, I didn’t dream fantasies anymore. It was all real. I could walk through his steps. And I did. I lived with him and his wife, their children. I raised those boys with him. I felt his pain as his sons died. I cherished them as he cherished them. And when he returned to you all, I could be with  _ you all.  _

Breathe the air you breathed. Speak the words you spoke. I could feel it, when Booker held Andromache. When he sparred with you or Nicolo. When he burned his tongue on too hot coffee, or when his head ached from too cold desserts. I could live through his eyes. I could live with you all. See what you became without me. Andromache wears my necklace still, and every time I saw it—I thrilled in delight. She was mine, even after so far apart, she was mine. 

It hadn’t occurred to me that Booker could see me too. That he could dream of me in my prison, trying to be with them in more ways than one. But when he asked about me I heard every word that you said. Every excuse and every platitude. You gave up. You couldn’t find me. I was destined to be alone forever. 

That was the choice you made for me. The sentence you all decided I deserved. For me to be alone in a box, only dreaming of a family that I use to have. Only watching through a window pane as you all laughed and played together, as you made love to the man you loved more than any other in the world, and as  _ my  _ Andromache found comfort in the arms of strangers who never treated her with the glory she deserved. 

You cannot possibly understand what it was like, watching you all pretending you didn’t know I was alive. Watching you all go on with your lives as if I wasn’t important. I was right there. Right there, you couldn’t see me, but I was right there. I saw everything. I heard everything. I knew everything and none of you listened to Booker when he tried to speak. When he said I was alive and needed help. You turned your back on me. 

And for the first time since they put me in that water I  _ knew _ , it wasn’t just those men who consigned me to that fate. It was you. You who decided I couldn’t be found. Who moved on without me. Who didn’t try, even as technology became more precise to locate me. I was alive, and alone, and dying over and over, and you didn’t care. 

_ (He says, quietly: “We...cared...Quynh.”) _

Maybe you did, maybe you didn’t. But all I saw, day in and day out were the people who swore they loved me—walking away. Perhaps it was true you couldn’t find me back then. Back when there’d been no light or air to breathe in the dark wet of the ocean. But after they found the Titanic? What then? After shipwrecks began to be salvaged, or submarine technology grew to the extent it has now? What then? Why did you never look for me  _ then?  _ If it hadn’t been simply for the fact that you didn’t care anymore. I was gone. Out of your sight, out of your mind. Unworthy of being remembered,or loved long enough to be  _ bothered  _ for. 

Do you know, though, I still tried. I’d wake myself up, angry and hurt and I tried. I tried over and over again to get out. To beat past the coral growing around the chains and my coffin’s  _ lid  _ just so I could get a chance to speak with you once more. To hold Andromache once more. To not spend one more night on the outside looking in, ignored by everyone and forgotten about by those who claimed to love me.

And...then...I saw Booker’s betrayal. Tell me, Yusuf, can you imagine what _that_ was like? To see him meeting with Copley. To see him preparing to sell you all out. To see him making underhanded deals about his own mortality, willing to destroy my family for his own gain just because he thought he was more lonely than I? To see all of that, and not be able to do  _ anything?  _ I screamed in those dreams. I screamed and raged and did everything I could to warn you all, and none of you heard me. None of you  _ listened.  _

Even when Nile was born, even when she dreamed of me, she didn’t  _ listen.  _ None of you  _ listened _ . Just excused me again one more time. Ignored the fact that there was a traitor in your midst because it was easier to just forget that I was real. I tried. I tried so hard and none of you cared. 

You even proved how much you cared when you sent Booker away. One hundred years? Your answer to this family has always been consistent. If you don’t care for someone you throw them away. He was given one hundred years of solitude...and yet he still got Nicolo calling him up, every week. Playing arm-chair psychiatrist with children’s books as if a book could undo any of the damage he’d done. 

When I finally weakened the iron, through rust and tine, to break free, it took me a long time to swim to the surface. Sometimes I didn’t know whether I was swimming up or down. I’d run out of air and wake up, not knowing which direction I was supposed to go in. I couldn’t see anything. My eyes burned, even after five hundred years to get used to the feeling. There was no light down where I was. No way to tell. I don’t know how long it took me to get to the top, and when I did, I was pushed back under by the waves. 

My clothes had dissolved by then, but the chains around my ankles were still there. Rusted and twisted, but still holding me firm despite my efforts. I couldn’t swim right with them on. Every time I tried, I’d get pulled back under. I spent ages, next, just jerking at the chains until they finally snapped and I could kick again. From there, I just kept swimming. I didn’t know what direction to go in, but I swam anyway. 

A fishing boat found me. They rescued me. All these people I’d never seen before, speaking in accents I barely understood. But they found me anyway. Brought me on board and dressed me. They were kind. They asked me questions and I answered them, but they didn’t believe me. Why would they believe me? No one ever does. No one ever listens to what I tell them, I’ve always been a Cassandra to the world.

And yet, despite this, they brought me back to shore. They made port in Bristol. A doctor came and looked me over, and said I was fine. Better than fine. But you know that don’t you. How could I have been anything other than fine? Five hundred years under the water and I didn’t have anything to show for it. I looked in the mirror and what did I see? But a face that was unblemished and clean. Not one scar for all the times something bit at me, tore at my flesh, gnawed at my bones. Not one sign of the chains around my ankles. Even my hair stayed exactly the same. 

That’s the real curse, isn’t it? To live as we do, and look as we do. We waged countless wars and lived endless lives, but there’s no sign of any of it. So why should we be considered as anything less than perfect? When we seem unmarred by the pain? When just beneath the skin there is nothing but rot and decay, and a thousand scars that will never properly heal? In a way. That seemed like a choice too. 

I walked out into the world I’d seen only through Booker’s eyes. I could smell again. Taste. I could breathe full breaths of air, and I could speak whatever I wanted to speak. However long it took me to get there. Some of the fishermen wanted to take me home, make sure I was all right before I left, but I knew what I wanted.

It’d been the only thing I wanted since I went under. I wanted to go home, and to never be alone again. It’s the only thing that mattered. That still matters. I just...wanted to make things right. Fix the things that were broken so that it’ll be okay again. 

I knew where Booker was of course, so I went to him first. I knew how to access his accounts, his contacts. Everything that was his was mine, it was so easy to set it all up. He didn’t notice anything. Too caught up in his book club and his drinking to bother with something as simple as checking his financial statement. It was better that way, though. Easier. It hurt less people than it could have. 

I worried every day that he would notice what I was doing, but he didn’t. He just kept on with his ridiculous stories and his weekly phone calls with Nicolo. As if either of them deserved it. Nicolo didn’t even come when Booker needed him. That was  _ you.  _ Nicky may be the sweet one, but you always did love more freely. And...you never did love me. No matter how much I wished you would. 

_ (He says, “Is...that why...you t-t-tied him up?”)  _

I didn’t tie him up for  _ you,  _ if that’s what you mean. He deserved  _ something  _ for betraying us, but no one deserves to be alone because of a mistake. I tied him up, because when Andromache and Nicolo and little Nile came for him, they took him home. He deserved to be home. He’d been punished, and it was over. Dragging it out is unnecessary. 

_ (He says, “You...buried me a-alive.” And she responds:)  _

That wasn’t punishment, Yusuf. Don’t you understand? It can’t have been punishment. Not for you. I told you already, didn’t I? I thought...I thought Nicolo was going to come for him. He kept calling, over and over, I thought it’d be him. I hoped it would be, because he broke the rule by contacting Booker and even if Booker’s punishment was  _ wrong,  _ Nicolo was wrong for breaking the rules too. So it would be all right if it was him. And I thought, I thought he could sleep under his tree and be happy in the end. He could dream of you and be at peace, and it would be fine. 

But it wasn’t Nicolo, it was you, and I’m sorry it was you. I really am. I didn’t want to do that to you. You didn’t deserve it. But I had to do it. I had to have a reason. A reason they wouldn’t send me away. A reason that they couldn’t abandon me like they did for all those years. A reason I had to stay. 

It had to be one of you, Nicolo or you. I knew from watching you all that it was the only way it would work. And...it’s a strange thing, being alive under the water. I didn’t want that for you. I couldn’t want that for you. They threw me overboard and didn’t care what would happen, but I knew where you were. I always knew you’d be okay in the end. But the water...the water is different. It’s not  _ nothing.  _ It fills your lungs and all your open spaces. I’d wake up as my body forced the water out of me, and then die as it slowly filled me once more. I didn’t want that for you...or even Nicolo. You know that right? I wouldn’t have done that to you. 

And...I kept my promise to you Yusuf. I did take care of Nicolo. I did! He kept not eating, so I asked him to join us for dinner. He kept not sleeping, so I told him to go to bed. He’d stop doing anything, and I’d give him something to do. I kept him busy so he wouldn’t worry. I hugged him when he seemed lonely. I talked to him, always, to keep him from having no one to talk to. I was there for him. I didn’t let him just waste away. He’s all right.

Yusuf? He’s all right. Isn’t he? Yusuf? 

* * *

Slowly, Yusuf pulls his hand off Quynh’s head. He lets it fall down to his side. She looks up at him, eyes wide, lips trembling. She reaches with trembling fingers to touch his knees. He doesn’t respond to it. Just keeps looking off somewhere to the left. Quynh turns to look too, but there’s nothing there except her blank wall. 

“He’s...not-not all right Q-Quynh. I-I’m not...either.” He closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. “Why d-d-didn’t y-you jus-just t-tell us y-you were out?”

“Why are you talking like that?” she asks instead. She touches his throat. His lips. “What happened?” 

“Y-you bur-ied me  _ a-alive, Quynh.”  _ His breath jerks in his throat. His eyes turn suddenly fierce, savage. She stares at him, unused to such hatred on his face. “I c-coul-couldn’t  _ breathe.”  _

“I couldn’t either,” she points out, trying to come to terms with what she was seeing. Hearing. 

_ “ _ Why d-d-d-d-d-GOD DAMN IT FUCKING HELL,  _ why d-d-d…”  _ he stands up, pulling away from her so he can pace about her small room. His fists are tight at his sides. He shakes his head hard. Takes a great breath in. Releases it. Does it again. “Why d-did-n’t you tell us?” each word is accompanied by a facial tick. A twist of his mouth, jerking of his shoulders as he barrels them through his lips by sheer force of will alone. 

“You’re mercenaries,” she says. “You only do things for a price. Save the girls, invoice later. That’s who you are. I needed a price. A value. Something that couldn’t be denied. No harm would come to me if I had you. And you were safe. Always. You were safe. Nothing drowned you. Nothing ate you. I don’t understand. Why are you talking like that?” 

She stumbles toward him. Grips his arms. He embraces her. Kisses her on the top of her head and sets her back on her bed. He steps away. Walks to the door. Knocks once. Quynh gets back to her feet as the door opens. “Why are you talking like that? Who did that to you? What happened?”

He doesn’t say anything as he leaves. He steps into the hall and the door closes and locks behind him. She chases it. Crashes into the door. Her fists beat against it. “Yusuf? Yusuf what happened? Yusuf? Yusuf, come back! Yusuf! Yusuf tell me what happened! Yusuf!” She tries harder and harder. She strikes with more strength than she thought she had. The door shakes on its frame, but it doesn’t break. It doesn’t crumble. She’s trapped inside. 

Trapped with no one listening. No one watching. No one caring. “Yusuf? Yusuf please, come back, come back. Don’t leave me alone. Please. Yusuf? Yusuf who did that? Yusuf?” Tears fall down her cheeks. She shakes the door by its knob over and over and over again. Nothing happens. 

The walls feel like they’re coming closer. Her ears swirl with the hushed whooshing of water pressing in all sides. Something bites at her face and she slaps at it. Crying harder and harder as she claws desperately at the door. “Come back,” she weeps. “Don’t leave me alone. Please. Please. Come back. Yusuf? Yusuf?”

But Yusuf doesn’t answer. And he doesn’t come back. She's alone. 


	11. Chapter 11

The plan was only for a night. One night, spend it at the Briar Patch, then they go back to Malta. Nile spends time with Nicky as Joe has his conversation with  _ her.  _ They dust off the paintings and tidy things up. Nicky tells her about their horrible garden and the leak in their roof. Nile tells him about Booker’s first experience with poprocks. 

It’s nice, he thinks, being home again. He’s missed it. As much as he loves Malta, there’s something unique about the Briar Patch when there’s a child in it. The wood soaks it in like the richest form of lacquer. The stonework glistens at each spoken word. Every hall echoes a child’s voice, giggling and calling his name from the balcony. 

In the month since he’d been away, Nile’s hair has started to go a little ragged, and he asks her if she wants him to do it before he leaves again. She grins, delighted, and pulls out her backpack, already equipped. “I hoped you might ask,” she admits shyly as he smiles and gestures for her to take a seat in front of him.

“I’ve missed this,” he admits, slowly working on her left most braid. Her hair is coarse beneath his touch. He collects some oil early on and gently works it around the coils as he starts to unravel. 

She replies, shyly, “Me too.” 

Band removed and braid slowly unweaving beneath his touch, Nicky asks, “How’s your mom? Marcel?” Nile grins bright and bubbly in front of him. She tells him everything. How her brother just passed his AP exams with honors and how he’s going to be graduating top of the class. He’s in a heated race with one other student to get Valedictorian and it might come down to which one of them did the most sports. Nicky makes the appropriately outraged noise when she starts talking about how bull-shit that is, and it shouldn’t matter who did more sports but who’s better suited for the honor. 

“Has Marcel decided what school he wants to go to?” 

“He got accepted to Cornell, did I tell you that?” 

“No! That’s wonderful, Nile!” He means it too. Nile always told him that she’d joined the Marines so she could get a shot at school. She didn’t have the grades that Marcel did. They weren’t bad, but they hadn’t been enough to get her a full ride. 

She’s nodding, tugging a little at the braids with each move of her head. He doesn’t mind in the least. “When we were kids, we’d watch football on TV, right? And all the teams had their logos. And he really liked Cornell’s bear. He told me, even back then he said:  _ when I grow up I’m going to go to Cornell _ . Neither of our parents went to college, but they wanted it for us, you know? And he wanted Cornell so bad. You should’ve seen him, Nicky. He worked part-time after school, saved up all his change, never spent a dime on anything he didn’t need. He studied so damn hard. And he got in. He did it all on his own.” There’s pride leaking off her in such powerful waves that Nicky can’t help himself. He leans down and kisses the top of her head. 

“That really is amazing, Nile. I’m so happy for him—for you all. When is the graduation?”

“Ah, June. Ma’s going to livestream the whole thing so I can watch it. Doesn’t matter if he gets Valedictorian I guess. He’ll still get to make a speech if he’s Salutatorian. But he  _ deserves  _ Valedictorian.” 

“He does. He’s wonderful.” 

“He’s the  _ best. _ ” 

Nicky finishes unweaving the first braid and moves on to the second. “And your mother?” This gets another excited squeal as she tells Nicky about how her mom showed up Patty Jenkins at the PTA when Patty tried to make a case against the school’s decision to start a new chapter of a Gay-Straight Alliance for the students. From what Nicky understands throughout the whole zealous report, is that Sandra Freeman is now considered the OG of the PTA and no one wants anything to do with Patty Jenkins anymore. 

His place as surrogate parent in Nile’s life is to do only one thing during such a story: loathe Patty Jenkins with every fiber of his being. He snarls and curses her at all the right moments and Nile pumps her fist in the air as she mimes Patty Jenkins’ pathetic attempts to undermine a perfectly legitimate club and its student body. “It’s 2021, even Chicago cannot be so barbaric as to not allow such a club.” 

“Exactly!” Nile exclaims. He finishes her other braid, oiling and combing her hair out now that it’s all free. She sighs into the touch and starts tapping on her phone. Pulling up a picture of a new style she asks if he thinks he can manage it. He squints at the screen a little and asks her to find a few other angles for him to look at so he doesn’t get oil on her phone. She complies and they discuss options before he settles in and starts with the new design. 

He works in gentle quiet. Nile taps about on her phone, reading Facebook posts and texting with her brother. She’d been terrified of Quynh finding out about her family, but here — so far away from Quynh and anything that could hurt them — she is free to do what she likes. It warms his heart knowing she’s so comfortable in this home. It’s all he wanted for her. Even the portraits on the walls seem more smug than judging at his behavior. He smiles at them sometimes, hearing their voices in his ears. Filling his heart with love. 

When he’s finished, they clean up the mess they’ve made. Nicky washes his hands in the sink and sets about making dinner. Nile hip bumps him. “Step aside old man, I got this.” He laughs but cedes the kitchen to her, settling on the table as she slices up vegetables. 

“You’ve gotten better,” he praises. She smiles, triumphant and beautiful as she swivels the knife in her hand with a little trick Booker must have shown her. She snaps the balde - whack, whack, whack, across the cutting board slicing up her zucchini and tomato into nice even pieces. 

Joe comes in just as she’s starting to arrange them around the chicken breasts they’d bought. “Welcome back!” she cheers. “I’m making a roast.” Nicky stands and goes to his beloved. He hesitates before touching him. 

“Joe?” 

“W-w-we need...to talk,” Joe says. “Nile...do you...mind if I b-borrow him for a b-b-b-bit?”

“No...it’s cool. You all right?” 

“F-f-fine. Nick-ck-ck-cky?” 

Nicky follows. It’s what he does. Where Joe goes, he follows. Only as Joe leads him away, he feels his heart hurting in preemptive warning. Something went wrong at Joe’s meeting. He’d known it would. He’d warned Joe it wouldn’t be pleasant. That it wouldn’t be something he’d find any sanity in. 

Joe had responded calmly, casually. Told him that he knew. That it’d be fine. Clearly, he’d been wrong. He wasn’t fine. They make it up the stairs and to their bedroom, and Joe closes the door firmly behind them both. He paces, biting his lip and not seeming to know where to start. He’d open his mouth, then close it in frustration, shaking his head as he continued to pace. 

“Joe?” Nicky presses, light and uncertain. Nile’s put on some music. Something British and poppy that she’d played for him a few months ago.  _ Sucking too hard on your lollipop, Or love's gonna get you down… _ “Joe are you—”

“S-sit, please.” Nicky sits. He sits on the edge of his bed and looks at Joe as he continues to pace. Continues to go from one side of the room to the other. Nicky’s his captive audience as Joe manages his thoughts. Tries to piece them together one thread at a time. The whole while, Nicky’s tension grows. The beating of the music, once joyful and light, grates against his senses. He wishes she’d turned it off, even as he knows she only did it to continue the perception of privacy.  _ Look, I’m not listening, I can’t hear.  _

“What happened?” Nicky presses again. 

Finally, Joe ceases his frantic movements. He turns and kneels at Nicky’s feet. He takes Nicky’s hands in his, and very somberly says: “I...don’t w-want to...put Quynh on-on- _ on _ that island.” He drags the ‘i’ in ‘island’ so long it may as well been its own word. Nicky barely notices it. 

He stares down his nose at Joe. He takes a deep breath, leaving his hands where they are. “Where do you want to put her?” 

“I...wan-want t-to  _ help  _ her.” 

The back of Nicky’s teeth click together. His jaw tightens. Squeezing and squeezing to the point that pain builds beneath his cheeks. He doesn’t pull his hands away, but they fold into fists beneath Joe’s gentle touch. Words lock down in Nicky’s mouth. If he speaks them, they’ll be savage and hateful, and he has no desire to  _ be  _ savage and hateful to Joe. Even so, the pressure builds to release them. To spit them into the air. To let them out with all his scathing fury, tearing apart the world in his process. 

Joe must understand that. He dares to lift Nicky’s hands and kiss them. Dares to look apologetic, though no such apologies actually fall off his tongue. “Sh-sh-she needs help, Nic-o-olo. She n-n-needs—”

“—Don’t tell me what she needs if you can’t even say your words properly  _ because  _ of what she did to you,” Nicky hisses, exploding outwards. He shoves to his feet, pushes Joe back. “You think I want to hear you begging for her? You think I want to listen to you crying for forgiveness. What the fuck did she say to you Joe? How sorry she was? How much she didn’t mean it?” 

“No.” Joe stands. He stands and makes no moves to get closer. Nicky glares at him. Glares and turns his back. Now  _ he  _ can’t sit still. He starts cleaning absently. Picking up a shirt he’d tossed to the side earlier that day. Throwing it in his suitcase to go back to Malta in. He rubs at dust that didn’t bother him in the morning but now grates against his very soul. “Sh-sh-she meant it.” 

“Oh, good. She meant it to hurt. Meant it to be painful. Meant everything she did. But you want to hold her hand and play pretend with her. Fantastic. Very well done.” 

“N-Nicky…”

_ “Say my name,”  _ Nicky snaps. Joe flinches. He opens his mouth. Closes it. He tries again. Opens his mouth, shapes the first letter with his lips, but his throat won’t produce the words. His eyes glisten as his frustration mounts. His fingers are tightening into fists. He wrenches his eyes from Nicky’s face. Shuts them and tries to make his mouth move. Tries to breathe around what he needs to in order to say it. 

“Ni-co-lo,” he eventually manages, whole body trembling from the strain. Nicky laughs at the attempt. Laughs, knowing it’s cruel. Knowing it’s mean. Knowing that there’s nothing for it. There are tears pressing against his eyes. He swats at them with a vicious swipe of his hand. Dust from his fingertips sear across his eyes. They blur and then heal just as fast. It makes the tears well faster. 

“You can’t even say my name. But you want to help her.” 

“Y-yes.” 

“Why.” Nicky asks his question like a demand. He spits it out, letting all his emotions carry him through, letting Joe know without even needing to ask, just how much Nicky despises the very notion of this method.

“I...I kno-ow. I know wha-what it’s like—”

“To be buried alive? Yes. And who did that to you? Again? Remind me?” 

Joe sighs. He shakes his head. “I-it’s not-not jussst tha-thaaat. She-she’s g-going to es-escape Ni-Nick- _ Nicky.”  _ Every time he tries Nicky’s name, Nicky see the pain cascading across Joe’s face. See how much it breaks his heart to stumble over something that used to be so natural. So simple. Every time he tries Nicky’s name, Nicky sees the empty box Quynh set him up to find. He feels a year’s worth of heartbreak and separation. He hates with everything he has. “S-she’s g-going to g-get out one-one waaaay or another. Y-You  _ know  _ that.” Joe forces a deep breath in through his lungs. “I-if w-we  _ don’t  _ do-do this. If...we d-don’t h-he-help her. Sh-sh-she’ll be worse.” 

Nicky tries to imagine it. Going back to that wretched house again. Going back and making Quynh her meals. Sitting around family dinner. Going on missions and protecting her because she needed protecting. Tries to imagine sparring with her. Tries to imagine sleeping nearby her. He even tries to imagine reading books with her like he did with his brother. Trying to help her feel better about herself again. “So she wins. She gets her perfect family back. And we all are trapped because what else is there to do?” 

Joe reaches toward him, but Nicky pulls away. His skin feels electrified. If something touches him he’s going to tear it to pieces. He’s going to rip it apart. He half wishes something  _ does  _ touch him just to give him an excuse to destroy everything around him. But Joe knows him too well for that. He steps back, hands slightly up. Meaning no harm.  _ Fuck you,  _ Nicky thinks.  _ Fuck you.  _

“It...it is-no...no- _ not _ ab-ou-t wi-wi-winning. N—” he stops, swallows, and gives up entirely on trying to say Nicky’s name. Just keeps going. “S-she nee-eeds hel-help.” 

“She’s a narcissist and has always been a narcissist, Joe. How long are we meant to help her? One year? Two? Five? Five hundred? She will never be anything different. She will be exactly the same. A narcissist who only cares about what  _ she  _ wants and nothing else, what’s in  _ her  _ best interest, and nothing else.”

“S-she’ll g-get off tha-that island.” 

“I don’t care.” 

“I c-c-c-can’t l-live think-king ev-every day s-she mi-ight c-c-come back. I c-c-can’t g-go back in that box.” The words spill from his lips quicker that time, a rushing tumble to the end. Nicky glowers at him, unappreciative of the effort. “I c-c-can’t l-let her p-put y-you in it. Sh-she w-want-wanted you. Always. F-from th-the start. S-sa-said y-you’d sleep. Be-e h-happy.” 

Nicky flinches. It’s a blow he hadn’t expected and it hits him solidly between the ribs and under his sternum. He chokes on his breath as he files that knowledge away. Where she’d buried Joe. What she’d planned. And, he laughs, startling Joe into stepping back, because it’s true. He  _ would  _ have slept. The terror would have overwhelmed him. Being in that box would have shattered any sense he had and he’d have begged for sleep to avoid thinking about the consequences. To avoid thinking about the too little air and the too small space. The dark that never left and the sound of his own heart thundering in his ears. He would have slept, and dreamed, and woken up only when someone deigned to unbury him from the ground. 

He laughs. He laughs long and hard, bending over and bracing himself on his knees as he chortles hysterically toward the floor. He’d have slept and avoided all of Joe’s trauma. All of his struggles to breathe, because he wouldn’t have even been aware of breathing. Wouldn’t have even known the difference between being alive or awake. He’d have slept and it would have all been exactly the same when he woke up again. Whenever that was. No trauma, no pain, no worries at all. Just close his eyes and pretend the world was good. “Let her!” Nicky giggles. “Let her do it, why not.” 

“N-Nic-Nicky,” Joe reaches toward him again, but Nicky shoves him back. 

“Fucking  _ let  _ her.”

“No.” 

“Oh, you can say that? You can say  _ No?  _ Good for fucking you. You know what I couldn’t do for a year?  _ Say no.  _ I couldn’t say no to her, Joe. Anything she wanted, anything she asked for, because maybe just maybe she might have told me where you were. And she never did. Not once. Not once. I’d have fucked her and Booker is right—she would have lied.” 

“I-I don-don-don’t think she would ha-have. Sh-She tol-told him wh-where I w-was.” Nicky stares at him. “She-she said,  _ where w-we first m-met.  _ Sh-she told him. She-she w-wou-would have t-told you.” 

“Oh, all right. Well. I’ll just go fuck her shall I? Will that make it better?” 

“Th-that’s n-not wh-what I’m  _ saying  _ damn it!” 

“Then what are you saying, exactly, because I don’t understand! I really fucking don’t!” 

Joe licks his lips. He swallows, takes in a deep breath. “She ne-eeds help. If...if we c-can help her, sh-she w-won’t c-come after us. B-but if we p-put her o-on that island,  _ alone,  _ sh-she’ll re-sent us. Sh-she’ll come b-back. One ye-year, two...five...five-hundred. She’ll c-c-come back. W-we don-don’t know h-how long sh-she’ll live. W-we can’t jus-just wai-t her out. Th-this e-ends on-only wh-when sh-she is-isn’t hur-hurting an-anymore.”

“Booker betrayed us and got one hundred years. Quynh buries you alive, and puts us in a home take-over for a  _ year,  _ and you want to be her brother again?” 

Joe shakes his head. His fingers open and close. He closes his eyes and says: “I want you to be s-safe. For-forever.”

“I’m not living with a woman who hurt us like that Joe. I’m not going back to her. You can’t make me.” Pain slashes across Joe’s face. Nicky knows what he sounds like. Knows the ultimatum he gave. Knows that there might even be a chance that Joe doesn’t fully grasp how  _ serious _ of an ultimatum he means it to be. “Stay with me,” he says as firm as he can, offering no chance for confusion, “Or leave me for her. But I will not have anything to do with her  _ healing.”  _

Nicky never thought he’d see what Joe looked like in the throes of heartbreak. Never thought he’d be the one to cause it. He wishes, desperately, that they’d never come to England. He wishes he’d talked Joe out of it. Wishes he’d put his foot down when Joe proposed coming to see Quynh off. Wishes he’d said any number of things then, so it wouldn’t come to this,  _ now.  _

The longer Joe takes to formulate a response, the more Nicky’s certain what his decision will be. He feels detached, suddenly. Unmoored. As if the world had come to a sudden halt and his mind had been thrown a thousand miles an hour out of his body. He realizes, suddenly, that the scene before him feels very much like a tableau. He can see Joe. He can see himself. He’s outside his body looking in. Watching as an astral projection above it all. 

The sounds of the house have turned muffled and uninteresting. The children’s laughter that always echoes in his mind whenever he finds himself truly at peace within these walls, have gone absent. It’s quiet. So utterly quiet. Joe takes his time answering, and Nicky’s body walks with singular purpose to the bed. He sits back down. 

He feels dizzy, suddenly. Hungry. He should eat something. Dinner won’t be ready yet, but he’s certain there’s something non-perishable he should eat. His eyes flutter. He sways, unsteadily as he sits. Something heavy touches his knee. He opens blurry eyes to watch Joe kneel before him. Hands ground him in place. Reminding him that he’s still here. Still attached. Still a part of this world. 

Nicky has no words to speak. When Joe does, it’s just the words he doesn’t want to hear. “Sh-she’ll hurt us worse, if-if we...I...don’t d-do this. Sh-she needs help. If sh-sh-she’s alone, she’ll on-only get  _ worse. _ ”

Nicky’s mouth says the words: “I don’t want to see you until you’re coming back to me to stay.” 

Joe wraps his arms around Nicky’s body, but Nicky’s body doesn’t respond. It sits, limp and pathetic, with its head aimed over Joe’s shoulder as Joe explains things like mail and texting and nonsense that hardly matters in the light of the very pressing issue that Joe is leaving to live with a woman who tortured them because he has  _ feelings _ about a future that hasn’t come to pass yet. 

At some point, Nicky’s mouth must create an assent. Joe kisses it. Stands. He looks bad, Nicky thinks, as he watches from outside of everything. Joe’s crying. His hands are shaking. His skin is so very pale. He touches Nicky’s face, but Nicky doesn’t react. Doesn’t do anything but sit there. 

And then, then Joe walks out. He leaves. 

He  _ leaves.  _ Nicky told him to leave and he  _ left.  _

Nile comes running into the room less than a minute later. She throws herself against the door, sees Nicky sitting there, and is on her knees right where Joe should be. Her arms wrap around Nicky’s body. 

It jolts him back into some kind of awareness. His eyes are his own again. His arms are his own again. He clings to Nile, clings to her and sobs against her throat. “He’s gone,” Nicky says. “He’s  _ gone,”  _ And Nile has nothing to say against that, because it’s true. She has no kind words to give, because there are none. So she makes up sounds and holds Nicky close, and they cry until not only has Joe’s car left the driveway, but in the kitchen below—their food begins to burn. 

If nothing else, it feels like an apt metaphor of all the things to come. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> I know this chapter was a lot. I really appreciate everyone's enthusiasm in the comments and I look forward to hearing your thoughts as always, but can you please refrain from saying that you hate me or that I'm the worst as it makes me very uncomfortable. I'm not very good at telling when someone actually means it or not. No one's done anything like that yet! And I know in English-vernacular it's a Thing to say you hate something when you love it, but I don't personally like hearing it. 
> 
> All other feedback welcome!


	12. Chapter 12

Andy and Booker do not take Joe’s announcement well, but they take it. Booker says something about finding a therapist via Copley, and leaves to make his calls. Andy gives Joe a highly critical look, then quietly informs him that she hopes he knows what he’s doing. She leaves him alone after that. Leaves him to make his peace on the bed that used to be Nicky’s once upon a time. A bed that likely will be his moving forward. 

And Nicky...Nicky’s face is  _ seared _ into Joe’s mind. Quynh had been right, in a way, when she said that injuries they face on the outside never appeared on their skin. Their bodies always healed, hiding away all traces of wounds. But this wound never  _ had  _ been on the outside, and perhaps because of that, Joe knows it isn’t going to heal anytime soon. 

He wants, more than anything, to get back in his car and go home. Wants to climb those stairs, say he changed his mind, and take Nicky back to Malta. That’d be the easy thing to do. The kind thing to do. It wouldn’t be the right thing to do. 

Quynh isn’t going away. She’s not a nightmare they can pretend doesn’t exist. She’d been right. All along, she’d been right. It had been easier to not pay attention to her predicament. Easier to just put it off, kick the ball down the road, wait until they couldn’t wait anymore. Well. The storm’s come. They called it upon themselves, and now they can’t complain about the rain when they’re the ones who made it pour. 

Isolation, internment, it doesn’t matter what they call it, none of that is going to fix the problem. Quynh isn’t going to disappear by magical reality. And Joe can’t risk growing comfortable in a world where at any moment she could come back and make them relive this hell. He can’t risk Nicky facing the fate she plotted out for him. Can’t risk Nile or Booker or Andy either. 

In a way, he’s almost glad Nicky demanded his freedom from Quynh. Glad that Nicky isn’t going to be a part of this mess, because he shouldn’t be there. Shouldn’t have to force himself to help her when he can’t bring himself to even think of her as anything other than a monster. Nicky isn’t better yet. Isn’t going to  _ get  _ better by being forced to face her. 

But, Joe concedes, he  _ can  _ get better without Joe there. He can do it on his own. It might hurt. It might take a long time, a  _ longer  _ time, than it would have otherwise, but he can do it. Joe’s seen him overcome countless odds. He  _ knows  _ Nicky can do this. 

_ When I see him again,  _ Joe thinks as he pulls presses his hands to his face,  _ I’m going to say his name.  _

“N-egh- _ Ni—”  _ he grunts, grinding his teeth as he chomps on the faulty word. His fingers turn tight in his hair. Nicky’d been cruel tonight. He knew Nicky had been lashing out. Knew that at some point, Nicky would feel bad about what he’d said. But he wasn’t necessarily  _ wrong.  _ Joe  _ can't  _ say Nicky’s name. Not consistently enough for it to matter. Not when his emotions were choking him and his eyes kept taking in the turmoil on Nicky’s face. He couldn't get the name to slide past his lips, and the end result had been nothing but a disaster of his own making. It’d been the first time anyone targeted his speech since it first started to falter, and it had hurt when Nicky said it. It’d hurt bad. Nicky had wanted it to hurt too. He’s always been good at finding the most tender spot and tearing it to pieces. Usually he was too kind to do so. 

Tonight, Joe hadn’t deserved kindness. Maybe tomorrow. Maybe the next day. But not tonight. Not when he’d walked away from Nicky like that. Not when he’d given Nile barely any explanation at all. Just a brief update on his decision regarding Quynh, and an even less informative update that he was leaving Nicky until it was over. She’d shouted at him, chased after him, and he’d told her to go to Nicky instead. She had, because she’s a good girl.  _ Nicky’s  _ good girl. Joe has no claim over her. Maybe once he might have. But after all this time apart, he knows full well where her loyalties lie. 

Booker knocks on the door. Joe sits up. “Copley said he’d find someone. I swear, whenever we get into a mess that man figures it out. Don’t know how we did anything without him.”

Joe grimaces into a smile. It’s an attempt at least, but he doesn’t have much to say. Still, when Booker sighs and rummages in the closet for something, Joe watches with little emotion. The unopened bottle of Jack Daniels that Booker retrieves, however, produces some kind of reaction. His lips part, and before he can even think to ask, it’s passed to him. “Get wasted, figure your shit out, and we’ll deal with it in the morning.” 

Joe holds the bottle between his palms. “I b-b-broke his...heart to-tonight.” 

“Yup.” Joe flinches, but Booker isn’t lying. Isn’t pulling his punches. Isn’t trying to cater to Joe’s sensibilities. It’s the truth. There’s no sugar-coating what happened. There’s no trying to make it better with sweet words or promises for a better tomorrow. Joe’s under no illusions.  _ Fixing  _ Quynh could take decades. He has no idea when he’ll see Nicky again, but he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that Nicky will keep himself just as scarce as he'd warned. 

He doesn’t want to see Joe until Joe’s coming home to stay. 

Or, and this is pure wishful thinking on Joe’s part, until Nicky’s ready to try to help Joe with Quynh. 

Joe can’t rush the former and he isn’t going to push for the latter. Nicky deserves his right to say  _ no.  _ Deserves his choice to be alone as much as Joe does. Quynh was right though. It is a choice. A choice made by others, but sometimes, made by themselves. Nicky made his choice because of Joe’s actions. Joe made his choice because of hers. They are, at the end of it, eerily predictable. 

He uncaps the bottle and tips it into his mouth. The liquor burns his tongue, his throat, his stomach. It turns him warm and keeps his body singing. “Sh-she said sh-she wanted it to be Nick-Nicky.  _ He  _ s-said she wins...like this. H-here we are. Family. W-without him...with-with  _ her. _ ” 

“Yup.” Booker bends down and starts unlacing his boots. 

Joe scrambles. Desperate to explain, again, why he made this choice. Desperate for  _ someone  _ to stop giving him that look that makes him feel like he should have just stayed with Nicky in Malta and never thought to return. “It-it won’t be-be over unless…”

“You’re right.” Booker looks up. He toes off one boot, then the other. “Putting her on that island isn’t going to help. Isolating her isn’t going to help. Everything you said is absolutely right. But it’s  _ shit.  _ You know it’s shit, I know it’s shit, and Andy knows it’s shit. Nicky definitely knows it’s shit, but fucking good for him for telling you off. And when Nile gets back, you’re going to stand there and let her tell you how shit it is when she finally decides to give you a piece of her mind. But  _ you’re right,  _ so now we have to deal with this shit...all of it. And I love you brother, I do. But I love Nicky just as much. And it’s real easy to blame you for breaking his heart right now, because you had an out that the rest of us didn’t and you decided to stay here  _ in _ this shit anyway.”

“Th-that island...w-would-wouldn’t have-wouldn’t have worked. I c-can-can’t let-let her l-leave it and—”

“— _ I know.”  _ Booker yanks off his socks. He balls them up, one inside the other, and shoves them into his boots. “I’ve thought about it too. We all have thought about it. None of us had an answer. Copley didn’t have an answer. That island was the best we could come up with and it fucking sucked. Andy was going to stay with her, did you know that? Just live out her final years on that island. Maybe that’d have bought us fifty years, but what then? So you’re right, okay? But it pisses me off that you have to make this choice. That Nicky has to make his choice. That we all just have to deal with this instead of just—”

“—pre-pretending it does-doesn’t exist.” 

Booker sighs. He rubs at his eyes and stands up so he can undo his pants. “Exactly. Out of sight, out of mind.” He huffs. “Like that stupid shell game she had us playing. Put her under a cup, move it around, we don’t have to worry about her until we choose the wrong cup and she comes out to torture us some more.”

He jerks off his pants and walks over to the sad looking dresser on the opposite wall. His pants get bunched in a ball to its left, and he rummages inside it until he finds some sweats to put on instead. When he’s done, he yanks his shirt off and replaces it with something bland and too big. Joe takes another drink. He holds the bottle out when Booker makes it back to his half of the room. 

They share the bottle in companionable silence for a moment, before Booker grumbles, “I just don’t know what we’re supposed to do, yeah? Like. What,” he fishes his cellphone out from under the covers of the bed. Taps at it for a minute and reads aloud, “ _ 6 Keys for Narcissists to Change Toward the Higher Self,  _ Number one: be aware of boundaries and practice consideration. Okay, so where do we start with that? Qunyh, you know how you kidnapped and tortured us? That wasn’t good. Perhaps be more considerate in the future.” 

Joe snorts. It isn’t funny. It’s horrifying. But he can’t help but nod at the comment. “N-no m-more bury-ing pe-people alive.” 

“Exactly. Good start, man. Glad we had this chat. Number two, develop and deliver substance. Oh good,  _ she _ is going to need to decide what she’s going to do and how to do it. That’s worked out so well for us in the past.” He scrolls for a few minutes and then laughs. “Number six. Return to humanity. Going great so far, don’t you think?” He grumbles a bit more. Joe takes a long swallow from the bottle. He’s starting to get a floaty feeling. 

He leans his head down onto his pillow, letting his legs dangle off the side of the bed. He cradles the bottle to his side, one arm tossed over his arms. “He’ll...for...give...me...right, Book?” 

Booker doesn’t reply. Or perhaps he does. He reaches over, takes the bottle from Joe, and drinks a long sip from it. The bottle’s half gone already. It hasn’t been that long since they started. Joe might have found that funny once. He’s not sure anything’s really funny about any of this, and he can’t make himself grin at his little brother. “Right?” he presses, desperate and hopeful. 

“Nicky loves you, man. More than anything.” Joe flinches at the phrase. Booker frowns. “What?” 

“S’wha’ he told me. ‘Bout when...when Qu-Quynh and him... _ ”  _ Joe swivels his finger in the air, then lets his hand drop down to his side. “M-more th-than anything.”  __

“He’ll forgive you,” Booker promises. He’s not in a position to make that promise, Joe knows that. But it’s what he believes. What he wants. If nothing else, it’s comforting to know he’s not the only one who wants it too. Who wants Nicky back at his side. The way he always has been. For so very long. “Hell, maybe we should take a page out of his book and give Quynh children’s books to read. They’re all about teaching morals and shit.” 

Joe tries to imagine Quynh reading Winnie the Pooh and can’t quite reconcile it. The image fades behind his eyes, shifting to something else. A leather bound book with the page edges painted gold. “W-why d-did you give...Nick-Nick-Nick- _ fuck. _ ” He slams his fist on the bed. It’s one name. One fucking name. All he had to do was say one fucking name and he still can’t do it. Tears press against his eyes. He rubs them away, but they keep coming. 

“Nicky?” Booker asks softly, filling in the name that eludes Joe’s tongue with the most savage dedication. 

He chokes on a laugh, waves his hand in assent. He manages to say: “Th-that book?” But then he falls silent again. Heart still tearing itself apart at his most glaring failure. 

“ _ One Thousand and One Nights?”  _ Booker asks. Joe waves his hand one more time. “I bought it when the year date was coming up and we still hadn’t found you. I was going to give him it then, but... _ then  _ we had that whole shitty thing with Quynh and I left and  _ did  _ find you, and well. I put it in his bag instead.”

“W-w-why  _ that… _ ” he shapes the start of the word in his mouth, tries to get it to form, but can’t even draw breath to make it leave his lips. He forces his lips closed. Drags air in, and with all the energy he has he shoves it out.  _ “One. Why. That. One?” _

“I...thought it’d remind him of you. But in a good way, I guess. He doesn’t like it?” 

Joe thinks of how Nicky avoided that book like the plague the whole month they were in Malta. But it was a plague that kept coming back around. He never hid it. In fact, he placed it in a position of honor on the nightstand. Every morning he saw it. Every night when he went to bed. It rested there, and it looked at Nicky with an ever watching gaze. Waiting to be opened. Never to be touched. 

Joe knows  _ why  _ of course. Nicky never talked to him about it, but Joe knows the why as much as Nicky does. He lifts the arm off his face just long enough to swivel his head toward Booker and really give him a look. Booker isn’t facing him though. He’s staring up at the ceiling, peaceful and calm. It’s the calm that soothes Joe’s throat. His chest. Makes it easier to say, “We...used t-to re-ead it to our kids.” 

Booker’s head snaps around. His lips open, but for once: he’s speechless. His eyes are wide and he even sits up a touch on his forearms. Staring at Joe with unabashed shock and confusion. “W-we had k-kids,” Joe continues. “S-seven,” Joe huffs a bit. Shakes his head. “S-seven kids. T-There was...Edw-ward and...and Ri-R-Richard. A-Ars-Arsalan...S-Saif-fa a-and K-Kamali. A-A-Adah a-and L-Lou-Louis-Ch-Charles. We...nev-er t-told you bec-c-c-cause, it wou-wouldn’t have hel-ped.” Joe closes his eyes. Takes a deep breath. “You lost your f-family. Know-knowing we l-lost ours...would-mnnn-would _ n’t  _ have m-made it bet-better...But...we sh-should have...said...ev-en-tu-al-ly.”

His brother still doesn’t say anything. Just stares and stares and stares. Joe sighs. “W-we used to read-read-read those st-stories. E-even be-fore they were pr-in-ted, we kn-knew them. We told them. Th-that book...me-eans a lot t-to us.  _ Him.  _ B-but it hurt-s too.”

“Because they’re gone,” Booker whispers. Joe nods. Slowly, Booker sits up fully. His legs fall off the edge of the bed. He sets the bottle off to the side, almost forgotten about after all this time. Joe suspects he makes a terrible drunk. Nearly a thousand years on this planet and he can still count the times he’s attempted it on one hand. And tonight, he really hadn’t put much effort in since he started to get more maudlin. There had been an attempt, and it failed. That thought alone is enough to exhaust him. 

For a long while, neither speak. Joe watches his brother through half lidded eyes. Waiting for him to say something. He doesn’t know if he wants it to hurt, or if he wants benediction. He knows there has to be something. Some kind of reaction or feeling, but he can’t puzzle out what he’s even expecting. All he knows is that he’s tired of  _ pretending.  _ Tired of ignoring parts of his family that are more conveniently left unspoken about. If he’s going to rip the bandage off one wound, he may as well lift them all. He can’t keep kicking things down the road. It needs to stop.

“I don’t think I would have reacted well,” Booker says, “If you told me back then.” He runs a hand through his hair. Some of his bangs shake loose and shimmy in front of his eyes. “Even now I...I understand why you didn’t say anything.” That hadn’t been what he’d originally planned to say, but Joe appreciates whatever mid-sentence editing had happened. “Seven, huh?” Booker laughs. “All at once?” 

“No. From...late four-four-fourteen hu-n-der-eds t-t-to late sev-en-teen h-hundreds.” The implication that they hadn’t adopted another child after Booker came into their lives isn’t missed. Joe watches Booker’s cheek twitch. His head angle downwards. “It wasn’t you,” Joe breathes out. “L-Louis-Ch-Charles...died bad. It hurt. W-when you came...it was easier to no-ot think. About him.” 

“Does Andy know?” 

“No. N-Nor does Q-Quynh. We...kept it t-to our-selves. W-We n-never thought th-they’d want t-to know...and it...was  _ nice _ , have-having s-something jus-just ours. Our...c-contribution...doing g-good...in this world.” More tears start to well. “W-we have paintings...hanging in our-our house.”

“In Malta?” 

“No. S’not far from here...” He gestures vaguely to the north. “When...when I was l-leaving, I t-told Nile wh-what I did. Sh-she went t-to help Ni-Ni-Nick... _ Shit!”  _ Joe throws himself up. He slams his fists against the bed, once, twice, three times. He grabs onto his curls and yanks them hard with both hands. “N-N-Ni-Ni-Ni-”

Booker whispers, “Nicky…” and Joe rips his hands down. 

Screams, “I KNOW!” He’s crying hard now. “He-he told me t-t-to s-say his name. I-I can’t say his-his-his name. I c-can’t sa-ay it Book. Why c-can’t I say it?” 

Booker’s there. He kneels on the floor before him. His hands wrap around Joe’s wrists. He leans under Joe’s bowed head to force Joe to meet his eyes. “Hey,” he says. “It’s cause you’re upset. Hey. Look at me. Say it slow. Come on, deep breath.” He makes a show of drawing in air, of letting it out. He does it again and again until Joe presses through his anguish and manages to match it. “It’s three syllables and it’s got a lot of hard consonants,” Booker continues. “The ‘c’ ‘k’ trip you up and you’re so worried about them that the ‘N’ gets hard. So take it slow. Okay? One at a time. Nick. Just say Nick. Close your eyes and just think on that one syllable.”

Joe’s mouth frames the shape. He feels his throat tighten, but he stops. Breathes. Waits for the feeling to pass. He keeps his eyes shut and he holds all the air in his chest. Then, slowly, says: “Nick. Nick. Nick. Nick.” He breathes deep between each recitation. And then, as one final try, says: “Nicky.” 

His little brother nudges his arm. “You got it. You got it. You can say his name.”

“Nicky,” Joe whispers again. The tears are coming back, but they don’t seem to be stopping him this time. He says his beloved’s name in reverence. It feels like redemption, even without Nicky there to pass his forgiveness. 

“The more upset you get, the harder it is for you to speak. That’s all this is. You were thinking about when you left him.  _ Anyone  _ would be upset about that. It doesn’t mean anything except it’s just harder for you. At that moment. And Nicky? Nicky shouldn’t have put that on you. Shouldn’t have asked you to say his name. He was wrong.” 

“He...had...a point.” 

“The point was that you were hurting. He knew you were hurting. Now he’s the one who hurt you because you’re sitting here freaking out about not saying his name right. Call it out, brother. He was wrong. Sometimes the people you love...make the wrong decision and it hurts.”

“Like...begging you f-for immortality?” 

“And burying you alive I guess. Different folks different strokes.” Joe snorts. Shaking his head. 

He’s stopped crying by now. He feels tired and a little off kilter though. His head hurts, his nose is stuffy. He rubs at his eyes and wipes off the tears on the bed sheets. “My kids' paintings...they looked so...j-judge-judgemental—”

“—Hey.” Booker squeezes Joe’s knee. “Breathe.” 

Air in. Air out. Air in. Air out. Joe breathes. He breathes and he tries to steady the vertigo all the crying has given him. The remnants of the booze almost certainly hasn’t helped, though he can feel his body healing it by the second. He doesn’t feel nearly as floaty as he had earlier. The world is painted in sharp precision now, rather than the vague blur that had carried him through thus far. “They’ll hate me,” Joe says softly. “When...when I die...and...see them again...they’ll hate me f-for what...I did. To...Nick-y.”

“No, they won’t.” Booker refutes it with such certainty that Joe can’t help but look up. Meet his eyes. Can’t help but pray, hopefully, as he looks up on his brother’s face. This is a man whose own children died, with hatred on their lips. And yet he denied Joe’s claim with such certainty. “You’re doing this to keep their dad safe. To make sure  _ we’re all  _ safe. They won’t hate you. They’ll understand. And so will Nicky. He’ll forgive you, Joe. And we’ll...we’ll get through this. All of us. One way or another.”

“We...always...do.” 

* * *

In the morning, Joe lets himself into Quynh’s room. She’s destroyed it in the few hours between when he saw her last and now. There’s blood on the floor, puddles of it. It streaks against the walls and the furniture and the pieces of her desk that lay shattered amidst the mess. Her bed clothes are tumbled and torn. They line the floor like tattered pieces of sail, washed to shore after a vicious storm. All that remains of a ship lost at sea. 

Quynh is tucked in a corner, her knees drawn to her chest. Her hands over her ears. She’s talking to herself. Doesn’t even seem to notice that Joe’s there. Joe gingerly steps around the debris. He nudges some out of the way, and he sits across from her. 

“It wasn’t me,” she tells him. “I didn’t do that.” 

“Yes,” he says. “Y-you did.” 

“It wasn’t  _ me.”  _ She throws her hands to her sides, shifts and crab walks toward him. Hands and knees skittering over broken wood and rusted nails. Any abrasions heal immediately. “You were safe,” she accuses. “Someone else did that. You were fine.” 

She looks so young. Joe reaches out and tucks hair behind her ear. She used to laugh and toss it over, perfect and wonderful. She loved her hair. Loved how she could do whatever she wanted with it. It looks so ragged like this. Ragged and knotted and wrong. In a way, he can even understand why she’d pressured Nicky that one time to comb it. It must have looked so nice, seeing Nicky doing Nile’s hair. It must have seemed so comforting. 

When Booker told him about it on the plane, it had only served to fuel Joe’s anger. But here, like this, it breaks Joe’s heart just a little. He misses, suddenly, the sister he used to have. The one he’d play fight with, the one who took him on insane quests to hunt monstrous beasts, and who laughed when she took on crocodiles in the river. The one who had always been a fire and a match combined. Lighting her own way and burning bright with her passions. 

_ That  _ Quynh had never been scared. Never been afraid of her own shadow. Of her own actions. She knew what she wanted and she took it, but she knew her own limitations too. Knew when what she wanted wasn’t what she needed. Knew when to step back, say she was wrong, and leave. 

“Q-Quynh,” Joe says. “It...was you.” 

Tears fall down Quynh’s face. She shakes her head. She places her hands on Joe’s shoulders. “It can’t be me,” she whispers. “It can’t. I wouldn’t hurt you. I wouldn’t. Not like that. Not like this. Your words. Your words. You always have the best words. I can’t have taken that from you. I wouldn’t. I wouldn’t take that from you. Please. Please.” 

“Y-you did.” 

Great tears slide down her cheeks. She bows her head. There’s blood on her skin. He tracks it with his eyes. There's blood all over her. On her wrists. Her neck. Her stomach. “What...hap-hap-happened?” 

He looks around, and sees a jagged piece of wood, torn from the desk she’d broken. Bloodied from tip to tip. “I must be mad,” she whispers. “To hurt you so.” He flinches. It’s an echo. An echo of years gone past. An echo from the voice of his long dead brother, who attacked Nicky and who Joe never saw again. “I should have died long ago.” 

It hurts to respond. Hurts to say what he needs to say, and not comfort the way he’s always comforted his sister when she struggled. When she needed someone to turn to that wasn’t Andromache the Scythian, her lover and idol in all things. Andy had always gone to Nicky when she needed a balm for her soul. But Quynh? Quynh had always been Joe’s. And still, despite everything, it hurts to tell her the truth. 

“Yes, but...y-you’re st-still here.” He lifts a hand and cups her cheek. “D-d-do you want...t-to get better?” 

“I didn’t want to hurt you,” she tells him. “It wasn’t the same. I didn’t...I didn’t think. I thought…”

“Y-y-you w-were wrong. D-d-do y-you want t-to g-get  _ better?”  _

“Is that even  _ possible?”  _

“If...y-you try.” 

“I don’t want to hurt you.” 

“And the-the-the others?” Her eyes flick to the door. She goes tense. Her lips warble. 

“They’ll put me back in the ocean won’t they?” 

Joe takes a deep breath. Needs to close his eyes to get this sentence out. Needs to say it in one go to make sure it doesn’t get fumbled or changed on his tongue. “Do...you wa-ant to...hurt the others?” 

Finally, she says: “No.” It’s quiet, contrite. She’s crying again. “Did I? Did I hurt them? I was helping wasn’t I? I slept with Andy. I played games with Nile. I read with Booker. I made sure Nicolo ate. I made sure he was okay. I took care of him when you were gone. I—”

“—Hurt him. You.  _ Hurt.  _ Him. Bad. Quynh. You...hurt  _ th-them,  _ bad.” The sob she makes is akin to something dying. She tears at her hair. Yanks it out but its roots. She gasps and chokes and screams wordlessly. Joe looks at her. Watches as she succumbs to the knowledge of what she’d done. As the understanding starts to filter through her. She repeats phrases over and over again. She didn’t mean it. It wasn’t her fault. It was her fault. She didn’t mean it. She’s mad. She should have died under the ocean. She can’t be near them. She’s a danger to them. She hurt them. She hurt them. She didn’t mean to hurt them. 

Joe collects her body in his arms. He holds her to his chest. “D-do you w-want t-to try?” 

“Don’t...don’t let me hurt anyone, Yusuf. Please. Please I don’t want to hurt anyone.” 

“I...know. I w-won’t. Will...y-you try?” 

“Yes,” she promises, clinging to him desperately. “I’ll try.” 

Joe closes his eyes. He doesn’t know what he’d have done if she’d said no. Doesn’t know if he’d have had the strength to accept the original plan, to let them put this pathetic creature on an island and hope that she didn’t grow to hate them. Grow to actively wish to harm them. Grow to want more than just a family to love her, but instead a family to destroy. He’d read somewhere that the first step to healing was to admitting there was a problem to begin with. 

They’ve taken the first step. He only hopes that they have the strength to walk this road until its end. 


	13. Chapter 13

Copley and Andy are sitting in a cafe. There’s a stack of paperwork between them, all of it related to one woman: Dr. Linh Tran. She’s smart, highly trained, and has worked with a variety of personality disorders found in military personnel and their affiliates. Copley had given Tran an amended version of Quynh’s history, and Tran has agreed to video-conference in as needed. Andy goes through all of this, slowly drinking her coffee and refilling it whenever it got too low. 

For his part, Copley just waits. Waits for her to make her decision. Tran is the seventh in a long line of medical practitioners Copley has brought for review, and every time it’s the same thing. Andy finds something she doesn’t like, she rips the doctor apart, and it starts all over again. 

They’ve been in a holding pattern for almost a month. Andy knows this. Copley knows this. Booker knows this. Nile knows this. And Joe, who sends daily text messages to a number that never responds, also knows this. 

Still, Andy drags her feet. “It won’t make sense,” Andy says, setting down the final piece of paper that confirms what Copley already knows: Dr. Tran is perfectly capable of working with Quynh. 

“What won’t make sense?” he asks her anyway. 

“All of it. She spent _five hundred years_ in a box under the ocean. Making up a story, amending it, it doesn’t make sense. It won’t make sense to Tran, and I don’t know if Quynh’s capable of not explaining things exactly as they are without...well...explaining things exactly as they are. She buried Joe alive for a year. He came back still breathing. Tran could be the most skilled doctor in the world. None of it makes sense unless we tell her the truth.”

“It’s your secret to tell,” Copley says, bland and patient. 

“The last time a doctor knew the truth they took pieces out of us for testing.” 

He waits. He doesn’t need to tell her the opposite sides of the argument. Andy knows them. She’s known them for years. They don’t change. They never change. Telling any mortal human the truth leads them to a potential outcome of more pain and suffering. One way or another. The human will always die in the end. They’re the ones left with the remains. Whatever that may be. 

Not all mortals were inherently evil, though. She concedes this without saying a word. She looks back down at the paperwork Copley had collected. There were those through the years who had known their secrets and not done them any harm. Some, were lovers. Some, friends. Some, were people who passed through their lives only for a moment. They touched each others futures and made markers in their pasts, but they were never there long enough to become attached. 

Andy closes her eyes. She’d known, even before she came here to meet with Copley, that if she didn’t have a truly justifiable reason to despise this doctor: she’d give in. Joe wouldn’t wait forever. He followed at her pace because that was how things usually went for them. But he wouldn’t sit idly by as she twiddled her thumbs and left their family to manage this crisis via wikipedia self-help pages or whatever it was they kept looking up online. 

Nile had come back to them with a backpack full of psychiatry textbooks and a temper that’d rile the gods. She’d tried very hard to shout Joe into a screaming match worthy of prime time TV, but he’d sat and took everything she said with hunched shoulders and a bowed head. Then she’d hugged him tight enough to make his ribs creak, and she made him promise to take care of himself too. 

All of the _kids_ of the family were ready to go to war on this, and Andy doesn’t have it in her to fight it anymore. If they’re willing to take the risk, it’s their risk to take. She’s not immortal anymore. She can’t be the one to draw the line in the sand. Soon, she’s going to die and all that will be left is them. If this is the choice they want, then she has to respect it. 

Quynh is going to be their responsibility once Andy is gone...Andy can’t be the one to put barriers in their plans. Even if she wants to. Even if the idea of exposing Quynh to a doctor who _knows_ the truth could be exposing all of them to another Merrick. Another Kozak. Another hell of their making. 

“It’s real hard to trust you to bring us to a doctor right now,” Andy tells Copley. He bows his head, but doesn’t try to argue with her. She isn’t sure if that’s the right answer or not. But like Nile, she can’t fight the unwilling. She can’t beat the man who stands there and accepts it with a nod. 

Pushing her bangs out of her face, Andy asks him to set up a meeting. It’s the best she can do. She hopes it doesn’t bite them all in the ass. She literally won’t survive it if it does. 

* * *

The waiting room is nice. Objectively, it’s very nice. It has a mild peppermint paint on the walls, pictures of soothing nature scenes, and a small table with convenient magazines to peruse. As far as waiting rooms go, it’s perfectly serviceable and...nice. 

Andy hates it. 

She hates the very idea of waiting rooms, to be fair. Waiting rooms are places where you don’t want to be, but have to be, before you can reach the destination you’re trying to get to. It’s a stepping stone on a path whose final destination is so close you can see it, but impassable by a closed door that only opens when someone else says it’s time. 

For the past two years everything has felt like a waiting room. Every step in this God-awful journey has been one wait after another. Every day, every home, every walk on the street. All of it was just a waiting room with a door that never opened. There’s no getting better in the waiting room. There’s only stagnation, and an endless look to a future that should come soon...but always takes too long. 

Nile’s sitting next to Andy. She’s playing some game on her phone. There are colorful blocks moving about the screen and she taps them to clear rows or columns of similar colors. A friendly, if anatomically incorrect, panda cheers her on the whole while as starbursts explode with each careful touch. 

It’s not the only game Nile plays. Sometimes she’s collecting Pokémon or a version of solitaire too. Andy’s caught her playing Scrabble and Words With Friends on occasion. Mostly, Andy ignores the games that Nile loads up on her phone. They’re colorful and a decent way to waste time, but they’re not things that Andy generally finds use for. Compared to idly sifting through magazines discussing furniture or this season’s fashion, though, Nile’s phone is the most exciting thing Andy can think of. 

She watches openly, not bothering to conceal any kind of interest. Nile doesn’t stop, explain, nor offer Andy to play. She keeps tapping away at her screen with the single minded focus of a soldier. If Andy weren’t ready to start poking her own leg with a knife just to make sure she really is still mortal, she’d have appreciated Nile’s dedication to the silent treatment. 

It’s a treatment that’s been going on since Nile had been voluntold to meet the therapist with Andy. Well, no. It’s a treatment that had been going on since Joe brazenly announced that whichever doctor Copley needed to find was one that had to be versed in sexual abuse. Andy had reached for a bottle as his words sank in, and Nile had torn it from her hand. She’d smashed it against the ground and told her that Andy didn’t get to run away from this any more than the rest of them did. Andy had left the team at the table, walked herself to a bar, and needed Booker to get her home. 

Nile’s been adamant on ignoring her from there. She’s done it with such ruthless dedication that Andy’s relatively certain Nile’s found a way to weaponize ‘petty.’ Andy’s equally certain that Nile texts snide things for the others to pass on to Andy for her, and they do it with prompt dedication. _No more hiding, boss,_ Joe had said after Andy grit her teeth through a particularly pointed text message exchange between Nile and Booker right in front of her nose. _No more playing pretend._

Considering their current level of communication, Nile hadn’t been Andy’s first choice as companion. But Nile refused to stay with Quynh with only one other person there to monitor her, and Andy couldn’t show off immortality on her own. She equally couldn’t get her head around letting anyone into _Quynh’s_ head without meeting them. Besides. She’s always the first one in. Even if she hates the plan and everyone in it. 

The door to Dr. Tran’s office opens. Andy lurches to her feet, practically twitching. Nile takes her time, pausing her game and putting her phone back in her pocket as a diminutive woman with long black hair put up in a sensible bun steps into the waiting room. “Andy and Nile?” she asks. They nod. “Please, come on in.” 

Andy doesn’t quite run, but she knows her strides are long and purposeful. She flees the tedium of the world’s most square liminal space, and enters an equally kind and pleasant _other_ space. There are beige chairs set around a coffee table. A sofa. Andy and Nile sit on opposite sides of it. Dr. Tran sat across from them. She’s activated a sound canceller. It fills the room with a background hum that threatens tinnitus but doesn’t cross over. 

They exchange some pleasantries, but it doesn’t take long for Dr. Tran to take up her notebook and say: “Mr. Copley appraised me of some of the details of your circumstances, but I understand you have some concerns about my assisting your friend?”

“She’s not our friend,” Nile mutters even as Andy says: “Yes.” Andy can feel Nile glaring at the side of her head. She ignores it. Clears her throat. 

“It’s a delicate situation.”

Nile cuts in, leaning forward with her elbows on her knees and determination in her voice. “The person we want you to help is bat-shit insane, but she’s immortal so we can’t actually do anything with her except hope therapy works.” 

To her credit, Dr. Tran takes that in stride. She nods slowly, brows only furrowing a little. She doesn’t even write that down on her notepad, as if sensing that the mere action of putting pen to paper might be too vitriolic for this meeting. Then, Nile removes a pocket knife from her pocket and without hesitating - slices her palm open. Tran throws herself forward as if to stop her. The pad falls to the floor, but Nile’s already holding the palm up to show the healing wound. Tran is frozen, staring at the injury for several long moments before shaking her head and sitting back down. “I…”

“She thinks it’s a trick,” Andy sighs. She looks at the office. It’d be a real shame to actually get blood all over it, and it’s not like there are many quick ways to kill Nile bloodlessly without Tran actively calling the police on them or trying to intervene. “Give me your wrist,” Andy sighs. Nile glares at her, but does it without complaint. It’s not going to be nice, but it isn’t meant to be. Andy breaks her arm hard and fast, forcing Nile’s radial bone to break skin. 

This time, Tran shouts. She runs to the phone, but Andy stops her and guides her back to her seat despite her struggling. Nile holds her arm up the whole while, until Tran is forced to watch the bone retreat back into the skin. The wound healing. “Oh my…” Tran’s lips open and close a few times. 

“Like I said. The person we need you to treat? Is like us. And she’s crazy. And this is the only option we have left.” Nile rubs at her skin to show there’s no lasting damage. She sits back into her position on the sofa. Andy sits on the other end. 

They let Tran think for a bit. Let her process. It takes her some time. She stares at Nile’s unbroken arm and her notepad stays on the floor. When she finally picks it up, she settles into her seat like a champion. She closes her eyes, takes a deep breath, and nods. “Okay. Please explain.” 

She could have had a worse reaction, but it could have been better too. Copley had been wise enough to instruct Tran to clear the rest of her afternoon so she could talk to them. It still took most of the day to explain. 

* * *

It’s late by the time Dr. Tran asks Nile if it’s all right if she speaks to Andy alone for a little while. Nile agrees and steps out into the endless abyss that is the waiting room. The door closes and Andy relaxes back into the couch. “You’re uncomfortable around her,” Dr. Tran states, blunt as can be. 

“No,” Andy shakes her head. She can almost _feel_ Joe glaring at her from afar. Sighing, she rubs at her eyes. “I let her down. She asked something of me, and I let her down. I let...everyone down really. Let Nicky down most of all. But she...she asked me to be strong for her and I wasn’t. I tapped out.”

“You’ve been through a lot,” Tran says. 

Andy’s heard that phrase before. Heard it endlessly over the millennia of her existence. She’s bathed in its variances on tone. The mystified and the pitying. The shock and the horror. Tran doesn’t have much inflection in her tone. It’s a fact. Stated as simple and as obvious as it is. “Yeah,” Andy agrees. 

“And have _you_ talked to anyone about your recent state of being?” 

The wording catches her off guard. She wasn’t expecting it. Even asks, “What’s that?” and sits up a bit straighter. 

“You’re mortal now.” 

“Ah.” She holds up a finger and then wags it once. “That.” It feels petulant to cross her arms over her chest, but she does it anyway. She looks out toward the window Tran has overlooking the city. At the sun shining through. The occasional bird. 

“Have you talked about it?” 

She hasn’t. Not really. A few casual mentions here or there, but there’d been no need to _talk_ about it. No need to discuss it. She can’t change it. She is going to die whether she wants to or not. Whether she’s ready or not. She’s going to die, and all this mess is going to be left behind when she’s gone. Her family will be broken, and she’ll be gone. 

At first, it had just been Booker. Booker, who she could still see or talk to when she needed to. When she wanted to. Booker, her baby brother who had understood her in ways that Nicky and Joe only _feared_ to understand her. Who wallowed with her when she needed to wallow. Who suffered as she had suffered, and who she had failed in taking care of because she’d enjoyed having someone to suffer alongside. Enjoyed not needing to lean so much on Nicky and Joe. Enjoyed the peace in knowing someone else wasn’t happy. 

The last time she’d let herself wallow, she’d inadvertently encouraged her baby brother to look for a way to kill them all. Wallowing about her impending death just seems pointless. Talking about it seems pointless. “You’ve been alive for thousands of years, Andy,” Dr. Tran says quietly. “If you’ll forgive a modification on a quote, don’t go quietly into this dark night. You have feelings, Andy. And you have opinions. Don’t keep them inside.”

Air slips out of Andy’s mouth. It comes in a long stream, leaving her body like a ghost from it’s victim. She closes her eyes. Tilts her head back. “You know what’s weird?” she asks. Tran makes an inquiring noise. “I’ve lived for thousands of years, never once appreciating the fact that I _could_ . Just. Lived. After Quynh and Lykon, I thought: this is it. I can go whenever. I don’t care. But now that I’m almost done...now that it’s _here_...all I want is to have more time.”

“That’s not weird,” Tran says. “That’s being human.” 

Andy tilts her head, assessing the diminutive woman that seemed suddenly to grow bigger before her eyes. She hasn’t changed. She’s sitting as she has since the start. Back straight, head up, pen still. But she doesn’t seem as small as she had before. Doesn’t seem to be a tiny thing, mortal and breakable. “You’ll be good for Quynh,” she concedes. 

“And you?” Tilting her head, Andy meets Tran’s eyes. “Forgive me for being presumptuous, but Quynh’s not the only one who needs help Andy. Even if I’m not the one you want to talk to...you should find _someone_ who isn’t your family. Because frankly? You’re in a bitch of a situation.”

The laugh that breaks free is quite possibly the hardest Andy’s laughed in a while. “Yeah,” she agrees. “It really is.” 

“Think about it,” Tran suggests. She stands up and motions toward the door. 

Andy thinks of something just before she opens it. Turns to meet Tran’s eyes. “Can I pass your number on to Nicky? Let him decide on his own?” 

“Yes. I’ll make room. I won’t be the one to tell you what he decides.” 

“I understand.” It only seems fair. 

Nile’s playing games on her phone when Andy finally leaves the office. She looks up and raises a brow expectantly. “I owe you an apology,” Andy says. “I’m sorry that I left that night.” 

“I know why you did it,” Nile says. “But it can’t be like that again.” 

“You’re right.”

“And her?” Nile juts her chin toward the door that’s closed solidly behind her. Andy hopes Tran’s not having a panic attack after all of this. It’d be a shame if they broke their doctor already. “She good?” 

“Yeah,” Andy says. She reaches out and puts an arm around Nile’s shoulders. “She’s good.”


	14. Chapter 14

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: This chapter discusses the sexual assault between Nicky/Quynh in more detail with a therapist. It is in the the first section before the cut. 
> 
> Because of the time zones around today's posting schedule this might be the second chapter posted in one day for some of you. Just double check this is the right New Chapter for you before you proceed! If you haven't met Dr. Tran yet - go back one page :D

Quynh sits before the computer with her hands wringing in her lap. Andromache had set it up for her. Clicked through the initial start ups of Skype and explained how a  _ Dr. Tran  _ would be helping Quynh understand what had gone wrong. What had gone so horribly wrong. She explained all this in a quiet voice, not fully making eye contact with Quynh the whole while. 

“I’m sorry,” Quynh says as Andromache’s preparing to leave the room. The call with Dr. Tran is set for five minutes from now. When it appears on the screen, Quynh just needs to accept it. She knows how to do that. She’s seen through Booker’s memories enough how to do that. It had still been nice of Andromache to show her. Even if Andy fumbled and lost her way a few times in the process. She’d tried. And that’s what they’re meant to be doing at the moment, isn’t it? Trying? 

For her part, though, Andromache doesn’t say anything. She stays there, half turned, lips pressed into a thin line. Quynh anticipates what Andy will say.  _ Sorry for what?  _ Or maybe, _ I understand.  _ Instead, when Andromache speaks, she says: “Why did you ask Nicky to sleep with you?”

Quynh’s fingers squeeze painfully tight in her lap. They feel like strangling worms, trying to break free. She glances at the screen, the clock on the upper right corner. She bites her lip. There’s not enough time before this call to explain it properly. Not enough time to give Andromache what she deserves to hear. 

She tries. She says, “I...I wanted him to love me.” Andy’s nose twitches. Her cheek spasms a little. Her lips press so hard together they almost disappear amidst the skin of her face. She turns toward Quynh. Her shoulders square and her teeth clenching. Her fingers squeeze and unsqueeze at her sides. There’s only two minutes left before this call with the doctor, and it’s all happening so fast. Quynh feels her breath tighten in her chest. “If he loved me...he’d stay,” Quynh tries to explain. 

“And if he stayed, he wouldn’t leave once Joe came home?” 

“I just wanted him to be happy. He was sad and—”

“You don’t  _ rape  _ someone into happiness Quynh!” The Skype call starts. Happy bouncing bubbly noises jingle through the room. Andromache tears herself backwards. She presses a hand to her face. She closes her eyes and breathes hard. Then she leaves. Quynh watches her go, listening as the call continues to ring in. 

When she finally brings herself to touch the accept button, she’s still not entirely sure that she’s breathing. “I didn’t rape him,” she says to the woman on the other side. This doctor that everyone in her family, except Nicky...she hasn’t seen Nicky since the day he killed her...but everyone else had explained what was going to happen. That this woman would talk to her. Listen to her. Help her. And when Quynh speaks these words, the doctor’s lips part, she corrects herself almost immediately, and then nods. 

“Who?” she asks. 

_ “Nicolo! _ ” Quynh replies. “I didn’t  _ rape  _ him, I wouldn’t do that.” 

“What  _ did  _ you do?” the doctor asks. 

“I asked him to have sex with me, he said yes.” The doctor nods, slowly. She doesn’t say anything else, and Yusuf— _ Joe _ —had said that this doctor worked by listening to words. The only way to get better was to talk. So Quynh kept talking. “He was sad. I know he was sad. I know he missed Yus- _ Joe.  _ I know that. And I tried making it better for him. I tried to make things right, but he wasn’t getting better. And Andromache wasn’t talking to me anymore. She stopped. She stopped talking to me. It’s not like we’d never killed each other before. I used to kill Lykon all the time and...and Nicolo got back up again. He was fine. He didn’t  _ stay  _ dead. I wouldn’t do that. I wouldn’t make him stay dead. That’s not what I’d do. But Andromache stopped talking to me, and she wasn’t sleeping with me. And when I tried to hold her she pulled away. And I wanted to be held. No one was holding me. No one wanted to hold me. And so I asked Nickolo and he held me. And I thought that it was nice. It was nice, so maybe if I knew he loved me for sure it’d be okay? Maybe it’d be okay? And so I asked him to, and he said yes.” 

The doctor nodded, waiting and patient. Quynh squeezes her fingers even tighter together. She leans forward, toward the screen, trying to look at the doctor and the simple office behind her. There’s nothing particularly exciting about her. She looks like anyone on the street. Black hair and pale features. She doesn’t seem like the champion her family insisted she would be for Quynh. But she nods, and she listens and Quynh opens her mouth and keeps going. “It wasn’t rape. He said yes. We didn’t even  _ get  _ that far. Booker interrupted us.” 

She waits then, waits for the wisdom of this doctor that her family found. Waits for benediction or salvation or condemnation. The doctor has stopped nodding, but she doesn’t appear too surprised by Quynh’s words. She doesn’t seem repulsed or put off. Once she seems certain Quynh won’t say any more, the doctor asks: “Have you and Nicolo ever had sexual relations prior to this moment?” 

“No.” Quynh laughs. She can’t quite imagine Nicolo even looking at her like that before. “He’s only ever had eyes for his  _ Joe.  _ In five-hundred years I’d never seen him so much as  _ look  _ at another person. Joe has. I know he has. He’s slept with other people before, but Nicolo doesn’t do that. He’s a good Catholic boy. Joe’s the only one he’s ever loved. When we first met, I used to tease him, ask him if he’d want to  _ be  _ with me, but he just blushed. He blushed so easily. He doesn’t do that anymore. I don’t think anything embarasses him anymore. He’s beyond shame.” 

The doctor tilts her head a little. Curious and inviting. “Why do you think he said yes to you this time?” 

“Because he wanted to know where Joe was.” Even as she says it, she feels her stomach start to twist. Start to turn in on itself. She licks her lips. “But he said yes. If he didn’t want to, he wouldn’t have said yes.” 

“If you didn’t know where Joe was, would he have said yes?” 

The pain in Quynh’s stomach grows. It sparks, sharp and painful just beneath her ribs. Nausea started to swirl around her body. A wave of dizziness makes Quynh’s head bob. “I...no, but…” The doctor waits. “He said yes,” is all Quynh can think to say. 

Still, the doctor nods. Nods, and very delicately asks, “Is it possible that his desire to find Joe, overrode his ability to say ‘no,’ as he would have done?” 

Quynh thinks back. Summons the image of Nicolo in that moment. The moment she’d asked him to sleep with her. He’d stood there, expressionless, waiting. He’d waited long enough that she almost repeated her request.  _ Will you...tell me where Joe is if I do?  _ He’d asked. 

Quynh had recoiled, not wanting to say yes, not wanting to concede. She’d almost told him ‘no’ then and there, but just in that moment, she’d felt her resolve shift. Felt exhaustion pooling over her. She’d let herself think,  _ would it be so bad if they were right? If Yusuf could come home and we could just be happy together?  _

And she’d agreed. 

She’d had Nicolo open that empty box to prove to herself that she could withstand his grief, but Andromache hadn’t touched her in months. Hadn’t spoken to her properly. Hadn’t been there for her. Andromache pulled away when Quynh tried to be with her. Stood rigid when Quynh wrapped her arms around her body and willed Andromache to know how much she cared. And every night, she drank herself into a stupor that abandoned Quynh to a cold bed and an empty heart. 

“I risked my safety to say I’d give him Joe,” Quynh says. “I was right to worry. Once Joe returned, they left. I haven’t seen him since. I shouldn’t have said yes. I shouldn’t have done it.” 

The doctor pauses for a long time. Then, she nods once. Slow and decisive. “You shouldn’t have,” the doctor agrees. “But not just for the ramifications on you. Also, for the ramifications on  _ him.”  _

Quynh shakes her head. “He got Joe back. That’s what he wanted. I don’t have him, Joe,  _ or  _ Andromache right now. Not really. Andromache won’t look at me. Joe...I don’t know why Joe is here. He should be with Nicolo. Why  _ is  _ Joe here?” She looks, as though her brother were in the room with her, but she’s alone. Her family told her she’d be alone for this. That no one would interfere or eavesdrop. This was her time to speak with this doctor, and they wouldn’t get in the way. 

“You’re right, he left when he got Joe back. Why don’t you think they stayed?” 

“Why would he? If he has Joe, why would he need to stay? For four hundred years I watched him walk away to do whatever he wanted with Joe. He never stayed with us.”

“Never?” 

“Not  _ never _ , but...not always.” And Quynh wanted it to be for always. Wanted to have her family around her. So she can see them. Watch them. Help and protect them. So she can hold them when she’s sad or play with them when she’s happy. 

The doctor waits patiently, but Quynh doesn’t have anything else to say. She doesn’t know what she’s  _ supposed  _ to say, in truth. She bites her lip. Looks at the clock. They still have time, and no one’s coming to interrupt. She doesn’t want to sit here in silence. It crawls at her skin. Filling her with discomfort. “I didn’t rape him,” she says. 

“He wasn’t in a position to say ‘no,’” the doctor replies. 

“Neither was I!” 

“Truly?” There’s no judgment. No malicious intent. The doctor raises a brow and simply waits. Quynh shakes her head. The nausea starts to increase. She thinks she might actually purge, but stops herself at the last moment. Swallowing. Swallowing it all down. She wrings her fingers even harder in her lap. “When you think of Nicolo, your family, how do you imagine them?” 

“What do you mean?” 

“Their thoughts.” The doctor waves her head. “Their personalities. Their decisions. How do they reach those decisions? How do they decide what they do and do not want to do, what they say or don’t say?” Quynh blinks. Her face scrunches up. She shakes her head, not understanding. “Do they make decisions like you would make decisions? Or rather, do you anticipate the choices they make based on the choices you want them to make?” She doesn’t understand. She says as much too. The doctor seems to consider for a moment, and then asks “How do you think Nicolo felt when you asked him to sleep with you?”

The question bites. It gnaws on the memory she’s often shied away from in the past few months. She thinks of it anyway, crystal clear and realigned. Booker, Nile, and Andy weren’t in the house. Nicky had been in the backroom, sitting cross legged with Joe’s scimitar on his lap. He’d been running a whetstone along the blade, soaking the metal with oil and cleaning it from tip to end. 

She’d come in, and he’d stood up. Put the scimitar away. He stood there, quiet and expectant.  _ How did he feel?  _ He didn’t feel anything. He’d just looked at her. She’d asked him to sleep with her. He’d asked her if she’d tell him about Joe.  _ How did he feel?  _ He felt...nothing. She couldn’t summon an emotion, couldn’t describe him with one. There’d been nothing. He’d followed her to her room and he’d done everything she’d asked until Booker interrupted them. 

“How would  _ you  _ have felt if Andromache was the one who was buried alive? And someone said if you slept with them they’d tell you where she was?” Rage courses through Quynh hot and bright. She snarls at the screen, teeth baring as her hands stop strangling themselves to form independent fists instead. 

“I’d  _ murder  _ them,” she hisses. The doctor waits. “I’d tear them apart I’d—” stab them in the face. Over and over and over and over and over again. Until they’re so dead they might never piece themselves back together. Then she’d leave. Leave and keep Andromache safe so that nothing and no one could touch her. 

“I want you to work on something between now and the next time we talk,” the doctor suggests. “Get a notebook. Write down what the people around you are  _ feeling _ . Write down what you  _ think  _ they’re feeling first, but then, if you feel comfortable: ask  _ them _ how they’re feeling. Don’t erase your responses, just put them side by side. Add as many notes and context as you can so you can understand why they feel that way.”

Quynh’s mouth has no words. She nods, dumbly, but cannot bring herself to speak. She reviews Nicolo on the floor with Joe’s blade. His placid expression. Angry. Had he been angry? Had he felt trapped? Did she really push him? Force him? Rape him? Is that why he left, in the end? Not because he had Joe and didn’t need her anymore, but because of  _ her?  _ What she did? 

“But he said ‘yes,’” she argues, softly, to herself. 

The doctor nods. “But did he  _ want _ to say yes?” 

His lips hadn’t moved on her lips when they kissed. She’d needed to guide his hand to touch her. She’d needed to push him back. Frustration had mounted in her the less active he’d become. She’d almost said something when Booker interrupted. Almost said that she’s  _ seen  _ him with Joe. Knows just how passionate he can be when he wants to. 

Wants to. 

He hadn’t wanted to. 

Tears press against Quynh’s eyes. She shakes her head. Shakes it and presses her hands to her face. The doctor doesn’t try to comfort her. She just waits.  _ I’m sorry, _ Quynh thinks.  _ I didn’t know.  _ Then, worse than before, she changes her mind.  _ I should have known. I’m sorry.  _

But Nicolo can’t hear her thoughts. He’s gone. And Quynh’s only path forward is to try. 

When the call ends and she emerges from the room, she goes down the stairs and sees the rest of her family gathered around the kitchen table. They’re drinking coffee and not talking to one another.  _ How do they feel?  _ The doctor would ask. 

Quynh tries to figure that out. They’re tense. Quiet. Unhappy? Dissatisfied? “I need a notebook,” she says. They all look at her.  _ How does that make them feel? How would that make  _ you  _ feel?  _ She shakes her head, amends it. “May I...please have a notebook?” 

Something like shock snaps across Nile’s face. She looks at the others, then back again. They all seem equally stunned. But Nile’s the one that stands up, walks to a drawer under the counter and rummages about inside it until she pulls a small spiral notebook and pen from its depths. She hands them over without a word.  _ How does it make you feel?  _ “Thank you,” Quynh murmurs. 

They’re still staring, so she retreats. She sits down on the couch, flips open the notebook and starts to write. 

* * *

Once the option was available, Nile set an appointment to speak with Dr. Tran. Copley had been her previous go-to for What The Fuck moments, but frankly, now he’s becoming too close to the family and Nile’s half desperate with the idea of actually talking to someone who isn’t involved. She’d toyed with the thought of telling her mom or Marcel about what was happening, but that would only worry them. They had enough on their plates at the moment without thinking that Nile’s living with a crazy woman and everyone’s suffering from at least five undiagnosed trauma-related-disorders. 

She waited for Quynh to have her turn before getting onto Tran’s calendar. Not from any particular care regarding Quynh’s progress, but rather an inherent skepticism on if Tran could handle the level of crazy that they’re all bringing to the table. Nile would be the first to admit that they’re not the easiest group of people to understand. 

But Quynh came out of her appointment asking about notebooks and actually using manners. It didn’t even seem like a mockery of expressions. She almost appeared contrite. Which is more than Nile had been willing to give her prior. The second appointment came and went, and Quynh continued writing in her notebook. Only now she’s asking questions of them.  _ How are you feeling? Why do you feel this way? What does that mean?  _ She doesn’t usually explain why she’s asking, but Nile’s smart enough to guess. 

It still fills her with a fury she’s rarely felt before as she considers it. When the third appointment continues to go well for Quynh, Nile schedules her own. She gets her timeslot, buys a notebook for potential homework in advance, and settles in. 

The good doctor appears on her computer screen looking refreshed and ready to talk. She’s calm and controlled, but she smiles when she sees Nile and asks how she’s doing. She doesn’t even ask after Nile’s long since healed hand or her formerly broken arm. It’s a level of tact that Nile appreciates. “I hate her,” Nile says. “What she did was horrible, and what we’re doing? It feels like we’re just being forced to do it. Like. Maybe she was a good person once upon a time, but I never met her as a good person. I just met her as the lunatic who buried Joe alive and tortured Nicky.” 

“And you,” Tran says, tossing the comment in as if it isn’t a live grenade. 

Nile grimaces at the interjection and shrugs. She knows it’s true. She’s not completely oblivious to the effect that Quynh had on her. She even knows that her temper’s been flaring out of control lately. Everything seems to make her mad. Even the stuff that shouldn’t. Like Quynh’s notebook. That stupid notebook that Nile gave her and Quynh cuddles as if she were a child, carrying it about like a preferred toy. There’s no reason to get angry over the notebook. But Nile is. “Nicky and Joe...they’re the only ones who made this whole mess seem like it had some positives. When Andy first got me? Explained what I was? All I saw were the negatives. That there was nothing good in the whole situation. No reason for any of it, just a mess. But Nicky and Joe never let me think it was all bad. They gave me their home. Helped me work it out with my folks. Gave me time to just...learn what it means to be this, you know? And then Joe was gone and Nicky was trying so hard to just. Suck it up. And it’s not fair. They didn’t deserve that.” 

“Neither did you.” 

Nile grits her teeth. “But it’s not  _ about  _ me. It’s not about how  _ I  _ feel. Nicky’s the one that got messed about with. Nicky’s  _ husband  _ is the one who got buried alive. Fuck,  _ Joe  _ is the one who DID get burried alive. What’d I do? Just stand back and watch and contribute absolutely nothing to the party?”

Dr. Tran doesn’t even bother to hide her disbelief. She looks so incredulous that the look alone stops Nile in her tracks. She picks up her own notebook, a thick one with a nice leather binding. She flips through the pages until she finds whatever scribble she’d been looking for. Then, with a perfectly implicatory tone in her voice, she says. “You took Nicky to his home, where Quynh couldn’t find him so he could decompress.”

“Well, yes, but—” 

Dr. Tran holds up one finger and Nile’s mouth snaps closed. “You worked with Copley to track down leads on the boxes sent around the world.” 

_ “Yes,  _ but—”

“—You spent time with Nicky so he wasn’t alone and grieving.” 

_ “Yes!  _ But none of that fixed the problem.” 

Tran shuts her notebook decisively. “What would have fixed the problem?”

“Finding Joe or getting rid of Quynh. Not letting her jerk us around.”

The doctor rolls her eyes in a purely unprofessional manner that is so surprising Nile can’t help but stare. “Everything you did, led Nicky to the Israeli connection and to Booker’s discovery of Joe. So you were  _ actively  _ working to fix the problem. As for  _ getting rid of Quynh,  _ well that’s the current problem isn’t it? How would you have gotten rid of her?” 

“I don’t know, but it would have made me feel better.” 

She half expects to be chided for that comment, but Tran exceeds expectations. She nods, acceptingly, and says: “Reflexive violence usually does.” 

“Aren’t you supposed to be telling me to do no harm?” 

“You already know that. Telling you violence doesn’t feel good in the interim is a lie. I try not to lie to my consults, they get irritated about it.” Nile huffs, and Tran grins at her. “It’s the aftermath that sucks, though. When after you’ve hurt the person you want to hurt, and now you have to figure out how to move forward.”

“But I  _ didn’t  _ hurt her,” Nile says. “And I don’t know how to move forward.” 

Quynh’s outside the room right now, asking people about their feelings and writing things down as if that’s going to make up for what she did. What she chose to do. And yeah, Nile can accept the fact that Quynh genuinely didn’t seem to understand the consequences of her actions. She can accept the fact that it was all a game to Quynh. A child and her dolls, moving them where she wanted, how she wanted. Putting them to the side when she was bored, and picking them up again only when she was entertained. Nile knows this. 

But it doesn’t make it better. 

And while Nile can go on a mission with Quynh, can trust that Quynh can use all that innate talent and skill to unleash hell on their enemies, Nile can’t coincide that with someone she wants to live with. Someone she wants to spend eternity with. Can’t trust that if the choice came down between Quynh looking after her own interests, or helping a member of the team: she won’t choose herself every time. 

“To be completely honest, moving forward only works if you know where you want to go,” Tran says. “What do you want out of all of this? If you could have your happy ending, where would you be?”

An image flickers behind Nile’s eyes. A dream, maybe. Of Nicky leaning against Joe’s arm as they have a barbecue at the Briar Patch. Of a painting, with the whole family on the wall next to Louis-Charles. Of Andy  _ actually  _ happy. And Quynh  _ actually _ sane. Of Booker flipping burgers with a too large spatula and a dorky-apron on. No one is upset. No one is hurting. No one is glaring or flinching at each other. “I thought I was leaving my home for a new family,” she says quietly. “This doesn’t feel like a family.” 

“No,” Tran sighs. “I imagine it doesn’t.” 

Nile swipes at her eyes. She clears her throat and shakes her head. “Got any advice, doc?” 

“Set boundaries for yourself and don’t let anyone break them. Hold them accountable when they do.” 

That sounds about right. Still, Nile holds up her notebook. “Shit, you mean I got this for no reason?” 

Tran laughs, smiling so wide that it makes Nile smile in response. “Fine, and write down what specifically upsets you and why.”

“It going to help?”

“Guess you’ll find out, huh?" 

Nile snorts. “Guess so.” 

* * *

Booker makes it another four months past Nile before he joins his first call with Tran. He only makes the appointment because Nile doesn’t let him breathe a minute without stopping to ask if he’s  _ sure  _ he doesn’t want to give it a try. The conversation he has with Tran, isn’t even a bad one. She listens, he talks, and he tries to come to terms with not only the shifting family dynamics, but also his place within them. 

Tran, he notes, has certainly gotten used to the things they say and do. He tries catching her off guard, name dropping and teasing when he can, but she doesn’t so much as blink. To be honest, Booker considers that she might just be the world’s greatest stoic. Either that, or she’s accepted the fact that they’re all equally delusional but she can’t fix that problem so acceptance is all she has left. 

They don’t talk much about anything important. He thought that they would go over his wife. The boys. Get into the darkest parts of The Year With Quynh. But she doesn’t navigate the conversation in any which way. She lets him say what he wants to say, and he relaxes into the comfort of the video calls. Sometimes he tells her about the missions they go on. The feelings he gets when they’re out in the field. 

As shitty as the world is, and he knows it can always get worse, the mere fact that despite their personal problems they still come together for missions means something to him. “It’s like...if we can do it then, we’ll get through it outside of it too,” he says. Tran nods, quiet and accessible. “And Quynh...they always said she could be a pit viper in a fight, and she is. She’s fantastic. But things  _ are  _ different now.” 

“How so?” she prompts. He likes that. When he pauses, she gives a gentle nudge and he’s back on track. It never feels intrusive. Never feels like it’s prying. Just a light bit of motivation that fills him with the strength to keep going. 

“I don’t think she ever really actually... _ got  _ it? Sometimes it felt like she just enjoyed the fight, not the purpose. As if all she wanted to do was go and kill our enemies, but the end result didn’t matter.” 

“And that’s different now?” 

“Maybe? I don’t know. She interacted with some of the hostages that we saved. She asked their names. She asked them where their families were. She told them this story about a giraffe that got them laughing. It just...it was weird? Weird but good. And it feels different now. Strange.” 

Tran waits for him to continue, but he doesn’t have much more to say. Even if she prompted him, he would trail off. She seems to understand that. She takes a sip from the coffee cup that she has by her computer, and he watches as she parses her thoughts together. “Do you think it’s safe for Nicky to come back?” 

It wasn’t the question he thought she was going to ask. But it hits him right beneath the ribs. He turns his head away. Thinks about his brother the last time he saw him. Blood on his face, in his hair, staining his clothes. He swayed as he stood by the car that would take them far away. Swayed and stared off into the middle distance, there but not there.  _ Is this real?  _ He’d asked Booker moments before Booker put his bag into the car and waved goodbye.  _ Is he here?  _ Booker had drawn Nicky into a hug, but Nicky barely responded. He’d confirmed it was all real, and Nicky had nodded. Sat in the car. Said nothing else. 

The last time he’d spoken to Nicky had been different, though. Nicky had sounded present. Cognizant. Had somewhat asked questions about the family, about Nile and Andy. Nothing about Joe. Nothing about Quynh. He’d called to ask Booker for a favor, and Booker had been happy to respond. Happy to give him anything he wanted, because really: it was nice to actually do something practically helpful for a change. Nice to be told: Just this one thing, and that’ll be it. And when he was done, the job was complete. No lingering side-effects, no need to look back. 

“It’s... _ safe?”  _ Booker says. “But...I don’t think he’s ready. Not yet.” 

“What about you? Do you feel safe?” 

He thinks, suddenly, of the day they found him in his apartment. Right after Joe had disappeared. Thinks of the ache in his shoulders and hands. The pain in his chest as he watched Nicky walk out his front door. No one had talked about Booker being in exile after that. No one asked him to leave. He hadn’t been motivated to remind them of his punishment, and even upon being found: Joe had made it clear Booker wouldn’t be sent away. 

During The Year With Quynh, Booker had nothing to truly complain about on a personal perspective. He had his family back. Quynh had never been anything but kind to him, and his own difficulties stemmed entirely from the fact that he despised her. He wanted Joe safe. He hated watching Nicky’s heartbreak day in and day out. But Quynh had never played the games she seemed to relish in with him. Or rather, she’d never tried to make him a part of her doll house in the way she made Nicky a part of her doll house. He was there, but not the favorite toy. Not the one that constantly got pulled and poked and prodded until there was nothing left. 

_ He _ never felt unsafe around Quynh. Merely stifled. But he doesn’t have the same anger that Nile does. When it came down to it, he finished the mission everyone wanted to finish. He lost his temper at just the right moment, had just enough information to go off of, and has the relishing satisfaction of knowing that Joe is safe and alive because  _ he  _ found him. 

“The only thing I feel,” he concedes, “Is relief.” 

“Relief?” 

“Yeah...it feels like it’s almost over. That we’re,” he raises his hand. “Right here...and all we have to do is go just one more step higher,” he moves his hand up, “and we’ll be done.” 

“And Andy? How do you feel about Andy?” 

He flinches, mouth going dry. “You really like going for the kill don’t you doc?” She doesn’t rise to the challenge. Just looks at him, eyes sad and face open. Ready to listen. And if he cries, well...she keeps it between the two of them. 

* * *

Joe doesn’t speak to Dr. Tran about his problems. Doesn’t talk to her about his Nicolo or their children or Quynh. He doesn’t discuss his year in a box. He comes to Dr. Tran, and they discuss massages, speech-therapy, techniques he can use so that he can one day look his husband in the eyes and say: Nicolo...Nicolo... _ Nicolo,  _ as much as he wants. 

He interrupts their usual lessons only once. Only once so he can thank her. Thank her, because Quynh approached him on her own. Approached him and said that she remembered Booker’s family perfectly. And when they sat down together, she described them in enough detail for Joe to sketch them out and report to Booker for certification. 

Booker collapsed the moment he saw their faces. His Amelie, his Joseph-Paul, his Maurice, and Jean-Pierre. He collapsed and wept so long and hard that all Joe could do was hold him until the tears stopped. Until he could pull himself together enough for Joe to sit him down next to an easel and canvas. Until Joe could sit there and paint Booker’s family into life. Amelie at his side, her hands covering Booker’s. The boys laughing and grinning as they frame their parents. 

“Thank you,” he tells Tran. He doesn’t tell her that Quynh had stared at Booker in baffled confusion as Booker wept. That she’d asked more than once if she’d been wrong to bring it up. He was  _ crying _ , that meant it was bad, had she made a mistake? She’d  _ thought _ he’d appreciate it. But if she’d made another mistake, then what was she supposed to do? 

He doesn’t tell her that Booker had hugged Quynh. Wrapped his arms around her and thanked her over and over. 

He doesn’t tell her that, because he knows: everyone else already had. 

So he says one perfect: “Thank you,” and he continues to work.

Chanting:  _ Nicolo, Nicolo, Nicolo, Nicolo  _ as if it were a psalm. 

* * *

Dr. Linh Tran spends three years speaking with her new clientele before she finally meets their last member. He arranges the call on his own merit, emailing her his name and mentioning that Nile had referenced her as the team’s contact. She clears everything she can for his preferred availability, and prepares her notes as much as possible prior to engaging in the call. 

There are things that she’s grown used to since she learned of these spectacular individuals. The way that they talk to each other, the way that they adapt and relate things to each other. They’re brilliant and fiercely protective, and they love more deeply than most people she’s met over the course of her comparatively short lifetime. In the three years of silence that has extended since Joe made the decision to leave his beloved to help Quynh, Tran has never seen a more devoted man. Nor has she ever seen a more supportive and caring family. It is as though they are all grieving alongside Joe, as though they themselves have been cut and torn apart simply by watching Joe maneuver through life without his partner. 

Tran knows that it hasn’t been a complete cut off between Nicky and the rest of the family. Daily, he checks in with Nile so she doesn’t worry. They play games on her phone together. He consistently beats her at Scrabble, but has yet to understand the subtle intricacies of Words With Friends. Nile visits Nicky when she has a moment to do so. Booker does the same. He’d given Nicky his hand built motorcycle to use as transportation too, insisting that if Nicky was going to stay in one place for an extended period of time, he might as well give the bike some use. 

Andy, in the few sessions Tran has had with her over the years, has even gone to meet with Nicky. Vacationed with him, so to speak. They’d travel together for a week or so, and when Tran next met with Andy she always thought Andy seemed more at peace than she had before. Like something smoothe had finally slotted into place and ended the confusion and turmoil that only grew with its absence. 

Tran doesn’t know what to expect when she makes the call. Doesn’t know who will be on the other side. What appears to be a young man frozen in time, certainly, but not the depth of the man himself. When the call connects, she takes in Nicolo di Genova for the first time. A white man with a finely kept beard and mustache. Brown hair that hangs stylishly long just under his chin. He wears a loose white collared shirt, and he smiles when he says his hellos. 

“It’s good to meet you,” she greets in turn. “How do you prefer to be called?” 

“Nicky,” he says, sweet and kind. “Thank you, and yourself?” 

“Linh, or Dr. Tran, whichever makes you feel more comfortable.” 

“Linh, then,” he agrees. He pauses, and Tran wonders if he’s someone that she might need to prod. To gently spark into conversation. He proves otherwise, though. He meets her eyes through the screen, looking at the camera rather than her face. “I know my family has been speaking with you...I think it would be good if I did as well.” 

“Of course, wherever you’d like to start.” 

He nods, opens his mouth, and begins.


	15. Chapter 15

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> TW: Conversations about Quynh's assault on Nicky, not graphic.

Nicky doesn’t stay at the Briar Patch long after Joe leaves. There are few things that he would like less than to be in this house with all of it’s echoing walls and without Joe there at his side. It isn’t the same as before, when Joe had been forcibly taken away. This time, the only thing keeping Joe from him was himself, and Nicky didn’t have the strength to fight that battle in the home where their children lived. 

Valiant girl that she is, Nile attempted to talk him down. Attempted to convince him that there were other things that he could do, other places he could go that would be just as convenient or good as here. Nicky doesn’t need her kindness right now. He knows where he’s going, just as he knows that Joe won’t go there unless he receives permission. With a heavy heart, Nicky hugs Nile and wishes her well. He collects his things and he leaves. 

He’s back in Malta before the day is out. 

The house feels colder, now. Sadder. They hadn’t finished all the repairs they’d wanted to do before Joe got a bee up his bonnet about saving Quynh. They’re still a lot they put off. Nicky wanders through it, haunting the halls with steps. He trails his fingers along the masonry, enjoying the slip and smooth way the stones feel beneath his touch. 

Joe’s Garden, or whatever amounts for a garden, is a pathetic mess. Their even more pathetic ladder rests patiently by their shed, hoping someone might one day break their neck trying to use it. It’s too late to start weeding, but Nicky flicks on the back yard light and inspects the work he needs to do. He gathers shovels and gloves, a rock rake and a leaf rake. He finds what used to be a burn barrel and he rolls it into a decent position to get to work with. 

The next day, Nicky goes to war. 

He shoves his fingers into the hard earth and pulls every weed and root he can find. The black smoke of the burn barrel beats the bugs back, but it simultaneously chokes him and makes his eyes water. He keeps pressing onward, gathering dead plants and throwing them into the barrel without looking back. He doesn’t bother trying to identify them. Gardening had never been his particular passion and Joe had enjoyed this place only because it gave him a chance to design new colors he’d never played with before. 

Sometimes, when they actually had the time to indulge, Joe mixed dyes by hand. He collected pigments from flowers and trees, showing Nicky how they can be boiled to make the color rich and then it’s just a matter of carefully sinking material into the concoction and making sure it’s entirely saturated. They spent a few years once, planting things and then dying their clothes. Joe made friends with the local weaving guild and collected fresh linens that he sewed into shirts and hand-towels. In return, he dyed their yarn and occasionally spent afternoons spinning wool with them. 

Nicky may not know where precisely everything went in this garden, but he knew enough on how to replace it. He rips everything up over the course of the day. Every root and stem, every stray leaf, every twig. He burns it all, then he dedicates his efforts to plowing the land. He carves fresh paths from one side of the garden to the other. He maneuvers rocks about so that it’s actually laid out properly. And he stops only to drink water, eat, or sleep. 

It takes him nearly a week to finish arranging everything the way he wants it. In that time, he’d walked into town more than once to collect seeds and fresh supplies. When it comes time for the planting, he kneels in the dirt and places each seed or bulb down with the greatest reverence. He gently pats the earth over each hole he digs, measures out his next spot, and creates a new home for a new sprout. 

The work requires all of his focus. Any time his thoughts began to stray to Joe or his family, he jerks them back into place with a firm overcorrection that leaves him both dizzy and breathless. Still, he keeps his mind on his task. He breaths with a sniper’s grace, and he plants seeds in a garden in hopes that they’ll soon grow big and strong. 

Once the garden is done, Nicky attacks the windows. The wooden shutters are removed, their iron hinges scrubbed down and refitted. The shutters themselves are repainted, then resealed. Some are sanded down after a few stray splinters threaten to poke his thumb one too many times. The rest don’t require such treatment, and he happily progresses without fear. 

Next is the basement. Chandler _did_ put up a light, but it didn’t stop the basement itself from already being a nesting ground for all manner of wickedness. Nicky curses at the creepy crawlies and he scoops up frightened mice by the palm-full. He escorts the mammals to the garden to make their home in and he stomps on the bugs with little to no care for the smears they leave behind. 

Donning a facemask, Nicky sweeps every inch of the basement. He obliterates cobwebs and seals up cracks in the walls. He tests the level of the floor and comforts himself that it all was draining toward the sub-pump with some efficiency. The hot water heater is decades old and he grumbles at it as it creaks and groans under his gaze. It doesn’t need replacing, but it’s on thin ice. He takes the time to inspect the generator too, ensuring everything is in good condition and nothing needs replacing or tweaking. 

It takes him nearly a month of constant effort to set the house to straights, and once he’s done: it’s a beautiful home that’s still missing its heart.

“Right,” Nicky says. He’s thrumming with energy. With a desperate desire to do something. If he sits down now, his thoughts will cannibalize themselves. He’ll go back to thinking about things that he doesn’t want to think about, back to feeling things he doesn’t want to feel. “Right.” 

He walks out, gets in his car, and goes for a drive. It takes three hours to drive along the circumference of Malta. He drives until he runs out of gas, fills up his car, then drive some more. He stops at beaches. He throws rocks into the sea. He walks along boardwalks and passes bookstores and patisseries. He sits in cafés and he watches children shrieking with laughter as they play in the parks. 

It’s on his fourth trip around the island that he stops at L-Università ta' Malta, walks into their admissions office and starts flipping through the multi-colored brochures on the stand. A young woman approaches him as he scrambles through the documentation. She ignores the dirt staining his jeans, the musty smell emitting from his shirt, and the unwashed state of his hair. She greets him in Maltese, he responds absently. 

“Are you looking for something in particular?” she asks. He looks up.

“When is the deadline to apply to the medical school?” His tone is more abrupt than he intends it to be. He winces, looks back down at the glossy pages of the brochure. His dirty fingers leave streaks along the edges. He’s trembling a little, keyed up and still desperate to move. To do something. He’d spent twelve hours in his car, driving all through the night simply because he couldn’t bring himself to stop or go home to his perfect house. 

And all those hours brought him here. Here, with a singular purpose in mind. The young woman frowns long and hard. She looks at him, drawing her eyes from his filthy work-boots to the muss of his hair. His cheeks burn as his fingers squeeze on the brochure, but then she reaches her hand out. She touches his arm. “Come, let’s sit down in the office. It’s cooler there.” She smiles and leads him deeper into the building.

At her desk, the woman introduces herself properly as Maria-Theresa. Nicky jolts when he hears it. He stares at her for a long while, lips parting. “My family is very traditional,” she says, mistaking his surprise for something far more normal than it is. 

“It is not that,” he replies. “My sister...that was my sister’s name. I haven’t met someone with the same name in a long time. It surprised me. I apologize. I did not mean to stare.” She doesn’t look like his sister. There’s nothing in her features to suggest anything more than a coincidence. But the name still feels like a balm in his mind. Reminds him of childish days spent running through their father’s estate, hiding from the stable master and stealing bread from the kitchens.

Maria-Theresa pauses for a moment. She looks him over once more. He wonders what she thinks she sees. “Were you very close to your sister?” she asks. 

“Yes, but she died when I was young.” He hopes that ends the conversation. After a brief issuing of condolences, it does. Maria-Theresa turns her computer screen so he can see it. She walks him through the application process and the due dates. She confirms his background, and he lies through his teeth about his credentials. The deadline is close, but it isn’t impossible. 

She prints out some pamphlets for him and takes him on a guided tour of campus. They wander in and out of buildings, stopping every so often to talk with the student body or observe the daily hustle and bustle of campus. They finish with Maria-Theresa handing him her card and instructing him to contact her if he needs any help to apply. 

He thanks her, gets back in his car and calls Booker. Booker answers almost immediately. “Nicky?” 

“Hey,” he hasn’t started driving yet. Is still sitting in the warm parking lot, looking at all the pamphlets he received. 

“Hey, man, shit, how are you? Are you okay?”

“I’m fine,” Nicky says it without thinking. He stops, considers, then says it again. “Really...I’m...okay. I’m in Malta.”

“You like it there.” 

“I do...I need your help with something.” He chews on his lower lip. He could have called Copley he supposes. If he were still a member of their _team,_ perhaps it would be a good idea to do it. But the desire doesn’t come. He doesn’t want Copley for this. Just...his brother. 

Booker clears his throat. There’s some background noise, but it fades out. Nicky thinks, suddenly, that it’s almost ironic how Booker is there with everyone and now it’s Nicky here on the outside. “I’d do anything for you, Nicky, you know that.” 

“I do.” He smiles despite himself. “Can you forge something for me?” 

It’s not what Booker had been expecting. He asks him to hold on a second, then rummages about to get a pen and paper. Nicky listens as he gets set up and when he’s ready, he tells him his plan. “I’m going to medical school. I need these documents to apply.” 

In a way, Nicky’s inordinately grateful that Booker didn’t ask him _why._ He didn’t question Nicky’s choice, didn’t try to offer an alternative to the decision Nicky has already made. He agrees to Nicky’s request for help and Nicky has no need to justify himself to anyone. 

The slight hesitation that Booker has toward the end of their call, where Nicky can almost _hear_ him asking if he wants to know about Joe, or if he wants to pass on any information, sends a surge of anger through Nicky’s body that is entirely unnecessary. “Thank you,” he says firmly before Booker can even think about it. He hangs up and breathes hard for a moment, pulse thrumming in his ears. Then he backs out of his parking space and heads home. 

There’s a lot he needs to set up before classes start, and he has no doubt that Booker’s forgeries will earn him a place on the school’s roster for the new year. 

* * *

Nicky fills his days with meaningless chores so that he doesn’t have to _think._ Whenever his thoughts drift to something that would require more energy than he’s certain that he has, he shakes himself violently and then redoubles his effort on whatever it is that’s occupied him now. As he waits for the start of term, some of his chores have become more anticipatory than necessary. 

He spends a day buying new clothes. Another day working with Booker on the logistics of transporting Booker’s bike to the island. On a Tuesday he starts going through Joe’s art studio on the ground floor of the house. He dusts off old paintings, starts wrapping them in protective cases, and creates a filing system so that Joe can eventually find what he’s looking for. He scrunches his nose at the disorganized state of the paints and brushes. He pokes at the feathery soft bristles on a few, then spends another few days driving to every art store in Malta to hand pick the ones that he knows Joe would use. He buys a few sketch pads and pencils as well, stashing them in side-tables around the house just in case. 

He gets himself a new bookcase, then sells his old one. He reorganizes all of his current books, and starts coming up with a system for the new books he thinks he’ll buy. Once his book list comes in from the school, he drives to the University on Booker’s bike to pick them all up. They don’t fit in his backpack all at once, so he leaves half of them at the register, drives back home and returns later in the afternoon to collect the rest. 

Then, once he’s home, he opens the first book and starts taking notes. The forgery got him into the school, but he knows beyond a shadow of a doubt that if he cannot understand the material it will be pointless. He’s familiar with the evolution of science over the past one thousand years, but some details never had been of much importance. He spends his summer reading books on biology, chemistry, and anatomy and physiology. 

Nile sends him a list of apps to use, and he downloads them onto his phone. They spend one evening over Skype, her holding up her phone so he can see it, and him awkwardly trying to apply what she said to his reality. They make a game out of the anatomy apps. Competing with one another to see who can name every bone in the body the fastest, every muscle, every nerve. When he tells her about the biology texts he’s working his way through, she says with great solemnity: “Nicky, there’s one thing you absolutely need to remember more than anything else.” 

“What’s that?” he asks, dragging over a notebook to write it down. 

“The mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell.” 

“Okay?” It’s not a particularly long note, and he frowns at it, curious at its importance. But Nile starts howling with laughter in his ear and it distracts him from the deeper meaning of cell formation as he tries to understand the joke. It apparently has something to do with the American education system and its many failings. “But _is_ it the powerhouse of the cell?” he asks, just to make sure he’s not committed to remembering a truly unhelpful tidbit. 

“It absolutely is,” she confirms. She’s still giggling when they hang up for the evening, and he checks his textbook just to be certain she isn’t joking. She isn’t. He’s still not sure why it’s funny, but he doesn’t forget it. 

But even with all his dedication, there were times when he simply couldn’t help but _think_ about what he’s decided he’s not _going_ to think about. At night, he tosses and turns in bed, throwing blankets off and pulling them back on as he struggles to find the perfect temperature balance. Worse yet, are the dreams. 

Joe is always there in his dream. 

This isn’t the first time that Nicky’s gone to school. Once, in the early nineties, Nicky had gone to college for mathematics. He’d come back home and Joe would be there with a cleared table and a chalkboard cleaned and ready for Nicky to explain what he’d learned. He’d sat with a bowl of chilled pasta and make all sorts of encouraging noises, asking all kinds of ridiculous questions that had Nicky scrambling to explain proofs and reasonings until he could cite them inside and out. 

In his dreams, now, things are skewed. The chalkboard is replaced by an anatomical model. Joe throws organs at Nicky telling him to name them as fast as he can. Eye, eye, liver, kidney, left lung, right lung. He catches them and tosses them onto the table so he’s ready for the next body part to be chucked his way. When Joe sends the last one, Nicky’s grinning. He’s named them all correct so far. He holds out his hands, and what lands in the cradle of his palms isn’t the hard-plastic mold he’d been expecting, but a the bloody—still beating—heart of an adult male. Nicky fumbles. His fingers squeeze around it. He looks up. There’s a hole in Joe’s chest and he’s lips tremble as tears fall down his face. “N-N-N-N-Nick-” He collapses to the floor, dying as Nicky’s fingers squeeze too hard and the beating muscle spasms and falls still in Nicky’s grasp. 

It doesn’t matter how often the dream repeats, or how soon Nicky realizes what’s going to happen, it always goes the same way. Playing, teasing, laughing, joking, then Joe’s heart in Nicky’s hands as Nicky stands over his dead body. His name gurgling out from between Joe’s lips, until Joe lays still and immobile. 

Not once in any of these dreams does Joe ever wake up again. It’s only when Nicky, covered in Joe’s gore after trying to shove the broken heart back in Joe’s chest, finally jerks himself awake does he get any chance at a reprieve. 

On those nights, it takes everything Nicky has to not answer the litany of text messages his beloved sends him day in and day out. It takes everything he has not to get on a plane, fly back to England and do whatever Joe wants him to do. On those nights, Nicky paces through the house. He walks up and down the path of the garden that’s grown in more magnificently than it has ever been before. He smells the spices and the herbs and the warm comforting sense of _home_ , and he knows more than he ever knew anything in his life: this is still the right choice. 

Then he goes back inside. He opens Joe’s most recent texts, and he reads them quietly to himself. The voice in his head changes to match Joe’s. His accent turns over the words, his pacing. The sound almost as familiar to Nicky as the sound of his own thoughts. 

_It’s the first time in decades we’ve been willfully apart from each other. Sometimes I forget you’re not here with me. I saw a lesser spotted woodpecker today, I turned to tell you but you weren’t there. It took me a moment to remember why. Are there nice birds near you? I hope so._

_Nile doesn’t like my taste in music. She says I need to learn some new songs. I’m getting ‘trolled’ by a kid barely a fraction of our age Nicolo._

_Don’t watch the new Mummy movie with Tom Cruise. It’s terrible._

_Lost power for a while. Nile knew before I did. Came into my room with a purple nalgene bottle and a headlight. Did you know if you put the light on the bottom, and wrap the strap around the top you can make a lantern? She’s a good kid. You did good with her._

_We were out shopping, and we got distracted by a kid with tattoos on his eyes and no matter what Nile might tell you, it doesn’t matter how startled I was too, Book’s the one who tripped over his own feet and took down an entire stack of tomatoes in the process._

_Been a long day. Sorry I don’t have more to say. Sleep well, my love. Have a good day tomorrow._

“Sleep well,” Nicky murmurs at the screen. He taps the phone to his lips, then closes his eyes. At least this time, when he falls asleep: he doesn’t dream. 

* * *

School starts and Nicky attends his first lecture with three binders in his backpack and two of the heaviest books that’d been assigned. He sits toward the back, disinterested in engaging with either the teacher or the student body. Some know each other, either from previous classes or their rooming situations. A few of the more outgoing members introduce themselves to Nicky and he greets them politely but with barely enough substance to ingratiate himself with them. 

He’s more than a little relieved when the professor appears and immediately starts turning to the syllabus. Nicky scribbles down every word he can manage, his handwriting titling out of his naturally formal typography and shifting to something more streamlined. He’d learned shorthand in the sixties and it serves him well as he dedicates himself fully to his transcriptions. 

They break only for fifteen minutes at the hour and a half mark. Nicky relaxes his cramping hand and idly watches the students milling about. His phone vibrates a touch, he checks it. Joe. _I believe in you._ He wonders if someone finally told him what Nicky is doing. If they took him aside and said: today is Nicky’s first day in school. Text him something encouraging. If they did, Nicky can’t honestly find it in himself to be too upset. Because, separation or not, the words fill him with a sense of calm that slashes at a rising mass of anxiety he hadn’t even noticed he’d begun to accumulate. He closes his eyes, thanks Joe in the back of his mind, willing it to transcend the time and space between them. Then he puts his phone away, and prepares for the second half of his lecture. 

Time goes on. 

* * *

L-Università ta' Malta has two mental health divisions. The first, Psychiatry, rests under the Faculty of Medicine and Surgery. The second, Psychology, rests under the Faculty of Social Wellbeing. Nicky understands the need for the split. One will enable the future graduate to prescribe medicine, the other will not. Even so, there’s a distinct overlap between some of the courses, and though Nicky hasn’t necessarily declared a speciality, he has no difficulty signing up for classes in both fields in addition to his other work. 

His academic advisor, a portly fellow with a chinstrap beard and glasses that make his eyes look too small, asked him if he’s absolutely certain he could maintain the workload that’s being asked of him. Nicky hadn’t even been lying when he said he had more time than anyone would ever know what to do with. He half thinks that the permission he’d been given came from his advisor wanting to see him knocked down a peg rather than any apparent desire to see him succeed. 

Nicky isn’t bothered by that either. He isn’t doing any of this to make his advisor proud of him. He takes his classes, goes home, spreads his books across his table, and works. In his labs he’s taught new methods for sutures that have been invented since the last time he’d learned. He practices on linen bought from Joe’s preferred weavers, sewing garments into formation and donating them when they seem serviceable. He’s shown how to find a vein to draw blood. Equally, which areas were the best for IV shunts and why. 

In what would almost _certainly_ horrify his instructors, he practices on himself when he gets home. He touches his fingers to his arm. Ties a tourniquet using his teeth and off hand, then pumps his fingers into a fist until he can feel his vein pulse under his touch. It’s awkward trying to put the needle in from this direction, but eventually he manages to consistently track his veins by touch alone. 

He tells Nile of his progress, and she tells him more than once that he’s _weird,_ and _seriously Nicky, why?_ But she laughs and sounds utterly fascinated when he explains what it feels like. She starts asking him questions about the sphygmomanometer and how a stethoscope and a dial can read a blood pressure. When she visits him over his winter break, he teaches her how to do it in person. 

“Why medicine?” she asks after she’s successfully called out his blood pressure three times in a row. “I mean, I know you did medical stuff in the past, but like. Why this? Why _now?_ I guess...”

He says, “One day, Andy is going to get hurt. It would be good to have someone who knows how to help her.” 

But Nile squints at the response. She turns her head toward the stack of books that he’s made no secret of studying whenever she’s done swimming at the beach or shopping in town. More often than not he goes with her, but they don’t always go everywhere together. She’s seen him reading, taking notes, devoting every spare second he had to devouring resource after resource. “Not all of those are triage,” she points out. 

There’s one book in particular, _Three Hundred Years of Psychiatry 1535–1860,_ by Richard Hunter and Ida MacAlpine, that has absolutely nothing to do with triage. It’s not even a required reading. He had gotten into a conversation with one of his professors and they’d mentioned it off hand. He’d needed to scour the internet before he found a copy, and it cost a pretty penny to have it shipped to him on Malta. He knows he could say that it was something just for him to read, but that sounds even worse than the real truth behind it. 

He picks it up and passes it to her. She immediately starts flipping to the table of contents, scanning through it with childish fascination. “I wanted to understand.” 

“Quynh?” she asks, speaking the name of the specter he generally ignores. He shrugs. Discomfort bubbles in his stomach. His skin starts to itch. He wants to clean something. Go for a drive. Do something other than talk about the thing he’s been working _very hard_ not to think about. 

He’s spent more than enough time in school learning just why he _should_ be talking about it, though. And Nile isn’t trying to pry, she just wants to understand. “Quynh is a narcissist,” he says. “I know this about her. But...what does that mean? Why should it matter to me?” he tucks some of his hair behind his ear, wondering if he’s being clear enough. 

“So you know the doctor we’ve been seeing, Dr. Tran?” Nile doesn’t look up as she asks. Nicky hums his affirmation while she continues to flip through the pages of his book. “She says that it matters only to the extent that we want it to. That if we _choose_ to live with her, then that’s when it matters. If we choose to work with her, that’s when it matters. But if we choose it’s in our best interests not to be near her, then it matters only as much as we let ourselves be consumed by it.”

“That sounds accurate,” he concedes. He sits back down beside the brilliant woman that joined their family almost three years ago now. He’s so grateful she’s been here. So grateful that she hasn’t let him slip away into oblivion. He made a promise that he was going to _live_ each day that he stayed in Malta. He wasn’t going to go back on that. Even if during the first few months, it’d been the hardest thing he’d ever done. 

“Booker and I have been talking.” Nile closes the book and sets it back on the stack it came from. She grins conspiratorially. “We’ve decided that once things get a little bit more stable, we’re gonna get our own place when we have missions.” 

Nicky blinks. Frowns. That’s...different. They’ve always stayed together when they’re on missions. And granted, Nile hasn’t been with them long enough to know what it’s like when they naturally float away to do their own things, but separating in between missions was when their breaks happened. Never during. 

_“And,”_ Nile goes on. “We’re going to get our own place during the off time so we’re not all crammed together every second of the day. Dr. Tran’s going to help when we want to put it into place. So that Quynh doesn’t go nuts or anything and she’s all ready for it. Might be a while, but that’s the long term plan so far.”

Nicky tries to imagine what it’d be like. To fly out somewhere. Have a mission. And then...scramble? Go to ground? Separate like...co-workers instead of family? It doesn’t feel right. It makes his intestines spasm in pain as anxiety starts to build in his chest. Wouldn’t they need the affirmation that Andy was all right? _Joe?_ She’d said Booker and her only. Did that mean that Joe would be staying behind with Andy and Quynh? And why Booker and her? If they were separating, wouldn’t Nile prefer to be entirely on her own then? Rather than have Booker traipsing after her? 

Unless… he side eyes Nile, frown deepening as he looks her up and down. She’d have said something if she and Booker were growing _that_ close. He knows she would have. He’s not even sure why the thought digs at him, but it does. He feels his scowl shaping on his face as something very close to anger but mired by far more possession than he thinks he has a right to feel begins to grow within him. It wars with his anxiety, and Nicky’s still trying to work out what emotion belongs to what statement when Nile touches his arm. 

He flinches at the contact, hissing when she draws back with her hands up. “You’re taking this worse than I thought you would,” she says. She sounds confused. “I thought you’d be happy.” 

Nicky closes his eyes, forces air through his nose and out through his mouth. He repeats the process a few times, then shakes his head once. Hard. He imagines all the wayward thoughts getting tossed back into their corresponding filing cabinets for analysis. Very slowly, he opens one cabinet, and pulls out the first bone of contention that had sprung up. “I am worried you won’t be safe,” he says as slowly and carefully as he can, making sure each word is absolutely _true_ before stopping and waiting for her to respond. 

“Yeah, one safe house is hard enough to get, but two is going to be harder, we know.” She sighs. “It’s one of the reasons we’re taking our time with this? We want to make sure that we’re doing it right. That when we get ready to pull the trigger, all the heads are in a row.” 

The euphemism cuts through his top level of agitation. He snorts. “You’ve been spending too much time with Joe,” he accuses. Nile grins. 

“When I told him it was supposed to be ‘ducks in a row’ he told me all about your sniping days, Hot Shot. I can’t believe you never told me you won _tournaments_ for distance shooting.”

“I’ll teach you some day. If you like.” 

“No thank you. He started explaining all that math and I stopped right there. You’ve got that market cornered buddy.” It hurts, just a little, that he doesn’t at the moment. He’s not there to offer that kind of support to her or the others. Something must have shown on his face, because she touches his arm again. This time, he doesn’t pull back. “Booker’s doing great. You’d be proud of him. Joe said it’s not as far back as you could do it, but he was practically singing Book praises on our last job. So. He must be doing something right.” 

It’s a kindness he didn’t necessarily deserve, and he thanks her for it. Shifting to a different filing cabinet, he offers his next concern. “You...and Booker. Living together. Is it because...your feelings for him have…” he genuinely doesn’t want to hear her affirm this, and the words die in his mouth as he tries to say them. He feels his cheeks growing warm. Nile blinks at him. Once. Twice. Then she bursts out laughing. 

She starts laughing so hard that tears streak from her eyes. She bends over, slapping one hand against his leg as she heaves in air between long stretches of guffaws that threaten to suffocate her. Even when she starts to wheeze, she’s wheezing from such blatant humor that Nicky just grows more embarrassed than before. “Stop. Stop. I understand. Okay. That’s enough. Please stop.” He groans and presses his hands to his face, ashamed and far too uncomfortable with the direction this conversation has gone in. 

“He’s like... _so old,_ man. _So_ old. Why would I...oh man. No. No. He’s _ancient._ He’s had kids!” 

“He was barely forty when he stopped aging,” Nicky grumbles, offended on his brother’s behalf. 

“He’s _old.”_

He waves a finger at her. “One day, there will be another one of our family, and I hope they treat you with the same courtesy as you’re treating him.” 

Nile starts laughing again, shaking her head in glee. “I’m going to be twenty-four forever,” she tells him. “Ain’t nobody going to be calling me old, ever. Unless the next one is like, literally twelve.” 

“I hope you get carded for the rest of your life,” he curses her, making the sign of the cross and finishing it off with a flurry of latin for good effect. She presses her hands to her heart as if she could feel the wound on her body, but continues to giggle for the next hour. 

Nicky can’t find himself to be too upset with her. He loves listening to her laugh. Even if it’s at his own faux pas. 

* * *

Booker calls him up a few months later, though, when he’s five hours into reading a series of case articles on the after effects of severe and prolonged trauma. The phone startles him bad enough that he jerks his head up and kinks something in his neck. He hisses and stretches as he stands to take the call, wandering about to loosen up his joints. “Seriously,” Booker says without any form of proper greeting. “What did you _do_ to Nile? She won’t stop calling me an old man.” 

“What, still? It’s been months,” 

_“Still._ Can you make her stop?” 

He could, probably. If he asks her too, and meant it, she’d almost certainly agree. The trouble is, Booker could ask her to stop too. If he tells her that it bothers him and he genuinely wishes for a ceasefire, she’d stop immediately. The trouble _really_ is, that Nicky knows full well that Dr. Tran has told each of them they have to be more honest with their feelings and actually talk about what bothers them rather than avoiding or pretending things didn’t exist. Nile always gave him a faithful report of the team’s psych-evals, and Booker hasn’t been particularly shy about sharing either. 

Which means, in very sad French, Nicky somberly informs Booker that he has absolutely no idea what he’s talking about, and perhaps Nile would be the best person to speak to about this. Booker snorts loud enough that Nicky needs to pull the phone away from his ear. He’s smiling when he brings it back though. “How have you been?” he asks. 

“Good. Real good, actually. Things are...they feel less tense here. I don’t know how Copley found this lady but she’s...she’s been doing a great job.”

“So I’ve heard.” 

“You gonna talk to her?” 

“Maybe,” Nicky concedes. “Not now. I’m busy.” 

“How’s school going?” Nicky delves into his latest set of practicals. He tells him about the surgery he was allowed to shadow. About the new technology that’s come out that can make incisions so fine there’s barely a scar afterwards. He tells him about the neurology labs he’s started doing, and what kinds of science they’ve invented just in the past few years that goes well beyond anything he could have imagined. “And you?” Booker asks, once Nicky’s done reciting his latest educational insights. “How are _you?”_

Joe had sent him a text this morning. It read: _It’s been a year since I last saw you, I hope you’re doing well. I love you, always._

Nicky tells Booker, “I’m doing well.” He doesn’t think it counts as being a lie. 

* * *

When school lets out for the summer, Nicky takes a few weeks off from endless studying to reassess the garden. While some plants were perennials, others needed replanting. He tugs at weeds and makes a few adjustments to the path he walks whenever he can’t sleep and needs to breathe for a few minutes outside. He’s tending to the kumquat tree when he hears the backdoor of the house opening. Head jerking up, he almost throws his spade right into Andy’s chest she’d caught him by such surprise. 

It’s still held loose in his hand, as she wiggles her fingers in greeting. He drops it without even thinking, running across the garden to throw his arms around her. She meets him with equal force, fingers getting lost in his hair. He tucks his nose into her shoulder and squeezes her to him like he can absorb her body into his own. Tuck her in by his heart and never let her go. 

He acknowledges, with more pain than he’d like to, that the last time he actually saw Andy was the day he’d killed Quynh. When Joe led him out to the car and they drove to the airport. He saw her, held her briefly, so briefly that it’d barely made a dent in the shock that had been rolling through his body at the time. 

Tears press at his eyes. He pulls back so he can look her over. Her face, her body. He feels like he’s assessing her for illness or injury, and perhaps he is. But it’s only to confirm that she’s here, safe and whole. And without— “Quynh?” he asks, suddenly breathless. He jerks, looks toward the door she’d emerged from. Panicked, by the mere idea that the rest of the team might be just inside, setting up shop in his home and—and—

“It’s just me,” Andy reveals. She squeezes his shoulders. He feels dizzy, suddenly. Dizzy and off kilter. He trips over absolutely nothing, he’d barely been walking to begin with, but as he falls, Andy jerks him back into position. She guides him to the steps leading up onto the breezeway and they sit there in the shade, looking at his spring garden as it starts to grow into bloom. “I...wasn’t sure if you’d like to see me,” she says. “Nile and Book...they seemed sure. But...I didn’t know if I should tell you, or just have you punch me.”

“I would never punch you,” he tells her, honest and sincere. He takes her hand in his. Their fingers wrap tight around each other’s palms. He covers their hands with his other, and she covers his with hers. All stacked on top, warm and safe. 

“You always were the best of us,” she says, shaking her head in a mix of wry amusement and something far more fond. 

“I told you a long time ago that I would forgive you,” he reminds her. “I only feared that you would not forgive me.” 

“For killing her?” she asks. “Or for leaving?” 

“Both.” 

“You more than _earned_ both.” Andy nudges his shoulder with hers. They let their hands fall back to their sides. He feels the sudden urge to play host. Standing, he helps her to her feet and brings her back in. He mixes her a cool drink, then shows her his house. The kitchen, the dining room, and Joe’s art studio on the ground floor. The basement, organized and lit up appropriately now with a light switch at the top of the steps and an emergency switch at the bottom in case someone forgets. He shows her the two bedrooms on the first floor, then the quiet library he’d been putting together in what used to be an office. There’s a large bathroom on the first floor too, fully equipped with a luxurious tub and an equally large stand up shower. Andy ooh’s and ahh’s at everything, smiling as he shares his life with her. 

He makes her baklava from scratch, and she waits on baited breath as it bakes. They talk like they always used to. He tells her about school, the only thing that consumes his life these days, and she tells him about the missions they’ve gone on. The places they’ve been to. Food. They talk about food. She came with gifts too, fresh spices and herbs that make his mouth water and change his mind about what to cook for dinner. 

She rides behind him on his bike as they run down to the market to pick up a few things. When they get back, she moans obscenely around his fresh baklava as he throws her spices into a pan and begins browning some butter. His mind runs through his recipe and he chops up meat and vegetables for the meal. “I...if you don’t want to talk about it, we don’t have to…” Nicky freezes. Closes his eyes. Listens to the food cooking. It’s nice, he supposes, that she asked. She didn’t have to. Probably wouldn’t have in the past. But it’s nice she gave the option. “But I...Nicky I didn’t know.”

There were only a few things she couldn’t know. And only one that happened in so quick a time frame, he’d doubt it’d have been feasible _for_ her to know. He nods, opens his eyes, and gets back to the food. He pointedly, doesn’t turn around. He doesn’t want to look at her. See her grief. Not when he knows why it’s there. “I would have stopped her, if it’d have been me and not Booker...I _would_ have.” Except, now he has to. He has to, because that’s illogical. 

Reaching out, he turns the heat off the stove, shifts the pan to a different burner and turns to look at her. He can’t make dinner _and_ have this conversation at the same time. He won’t ruin her gift because he can’t multitask through this. “I never thought you’d have let it continue,” he tells her. She looks exactly as tragic as he’d thought she would. “You’ve never willfully let us come to harm, Andy. You never would. You love us. I have always trusted you. I always will.”

“I didn’t stop her from getting that bad,” Andy refutes. “Didn’t find Joe, didn’t put a stop to all of her demands or—”

“Neither did I.” He doesn’t want to be touched right now, but he knows she does. Knows that she needs some sort of confirmation that he’s still right here. Her little brother. Her best friend. He reaches for her. Squeezes her shoulder. “We didn’t have many options, but...I don’t blame you for any of it.”

“I’m the leader,” she says. “The...it was my responsibility to keep you safe, and I failed.” 

“Not me,” he replies. “You have never failed _me,_ Andy.” He steps forward. Embraces her in a way that’s so different from their first meeting. Before, the joy in seeing each other had overshadowed every other part of their histories. Before, they’d been at their most honest. Here, huddled in the pleasant afternoon warmth of his kitchen, they are at their most fragile. He holds her, and she holds him. 

When they pull apart, Andy wipes at her eyes. She clears her throat. Pats his arm and steps back. She sips her drink as he returns to their meal. “I don’t think of it,” he tells her, quiet and honest. “That day...it was not so different from every day that came before. And the thing itself...was not so very long. Booker stopped us from actually…” he hates even drawing attention to the facts of the matter. Wishes everyone would stop focusing on it so he could continue his life without it consuming his thoughts. 

When he says he doesn’t think of it, he isn’t being willfully unhelpful to her. Isn’t trying to obfuscate the facts. It was never Quynh’s attempted assault that drove him to clean his house, go for a drive, or attack his garden. It was never her hands on his, nor even her lips on his own. All of those had been secondary features to the more pressing reality of the moment. He’d have given her anything she’d asked for, so long as he could have Joe back in his life. 

“In truth,” he whispers to the vegetables. “I am glad to be apart from Yusuf now...I had not thought that I could conceive of a time when we would ever not be side by side. I had not thought that there would ever be a moment when I could _live_ without him by my side. We talked about if we could do it, if we could go through life without one another. I always thought I lied to him. Lied when I promised I’d live past his death. When Quynh took him, I thought: this is reality. I cannot move without him. Cannot live without him. Cannot breathe without him. I would let her do anything she wanted to me so long as I could have him back. I valued _myself_ so little that I didn’t tell her to stop. I didn’t give her boundaries. I...said yes because I didn’t care what happened to me then, or after. As long as I had _him._ ” 

Nicky picks up a spatula. He stirs his mixture. Lowers the heat just a touch. He does not look back to Andy, but he can hear her behind him. Breathing slow and steady. Listening as he explains. “I was furious, Andromache. I was so angry that I was letting her do all of these things. So angry that I was being chained by the one I loved just as much as the one who issued the threat. It wasn’t his fault, I know that. But I did all of that for _him,_ and…” He sighs. “I shouldn’t have. We found him without Quynh. We could have put her in a padded room and walked away, and we would have found Yusuf exactly when we found him. Perhaps sooner. Because we wouldn’t have been so fucking distracted.” His squeezing the spatula too hard. It bends a little in his grip. He fixes it, stirs absently, and starts adding more spices and flavors. 

“I don’t know why I gave Yusuf that ultimatum. I don’t know why I worded it the way that I did. I know that at that moment, I thought I would die from the pain of watching him walk away.” He looks back at Andy. _“But I didn’t.”_ His lips spread into a strange kind of smile. It’s not happy, but it’s not tragic either. It is someplace in between. As so many things in life are. Neither perfect, nor imperfect. Simply alive. “I did not die. I did not fall apart. I did not suffer some great tragedy. I came here...and I did the things I needed to do. I applied for school, and I’m succeeding. I can live without him. He is the sun in my life, but looking at the sun with eyes wide open, hurts. And I forgot how to take care of myself when surrounded by his light. When surrendering to my devotion. I know better now. I’m...working on how to be better in the future. So that when I go home, I won’t make the same choice again.”

Andy nods. There’s little more she can do. She nods, and says only: “Icarus with remade wings,” and he smiles at the idea. 

“To tell the truth,” he whispers. “Sometimes I cannot wait to unfurl those wings and fly.” 

“Give it time. The sun’s always there. He’ll be ready for you when you’re ready to try.” 

This time, when he smiles, it’s pure and genuine. Filled with over nine hundred years of certainty. He smiles so bright, and says: “I know.” 

Out the window, the sun sets for the evening. He’ll be ready for tomorrow, when it rises once more. 

* * *

Nicky joins an ambulance unit during his second year in medical school. His peers, a gangly group of dedicated medics who he’s grown more fond of the more time he’s spent in their presence, tease him good naturedly when they find out. One of the three Lukes in their cohort (differentiated only by the grudging acceptance of Luke, Luca, and Lukas) actually threw his arm over Nicky’s shoulders and lamented his future academic career. “How are you going to keep up if you spend all night in the back of an ambulance?” 

“I’m pretty sure all Nicky _does_ is eat, sleep, and breathe schoolwork,” Marta, a third year med-student, says. 

“That’s not true,” Nicky informs them all, gently maneuvering away. He grins wide. “Sometimes I _also_ volunteer at the soup kitchen and build houses for the poor.” He’s teasing, even if it is true, and they laugh, calling him _St. Nicholas._

They’d invited themselves over during Christmas once they discovered he intended to spend it alone. He’d found himself surrounded by young and eager members of his cohort, who asked questions and told stories. They laughed and played games. He admitted he’d never played _Cards Against Humanity,_ and for hours they went through round after round in joyous delight. He’d been so delighted by the experience that he’d called Nile the first moment he could, forgetting about the time difference entirely. She had gone to Montreal for the holiday, meeting with her brother and mother far away from where prying eyes might see them together as a family. 

She woke up, groaning and slurring her words, but she listened as he explained the rules of the card game and asked if she’d ever played it. “Nicky,” she’d said. “I love you so much. But I will seriously kick your ass if you start picking up memes too. Only one of us is allowed to know them in this family, and I need _something_ to hold over all your heads when y’all get maudlin.” 

He refused to make that promise, and his cohort has eagerly started to explain them to him whenever he shows the slightest form of interest. 

“Still though, I don’t get it,” Lukas says. “Don’t you want a break?” 

“Not really,” Nicky replies. “Helping people is what I’m meant to do. I have not given back in a long time. I’m grateful they accepted me.” 

They stare at him as if it was a particularly strange thing to say. He supposes it must be. Service brings him joy. To him, joining the ambulance unit gives him a level of peace that he’d been struggling to reclaim. It had been Andy who’d suggested it too. Who had listened as he’d explained all the work he’d done, and told him that if he enjoyed the practical side of medicine so much, serving as a paramedic would give him plenty of experience if he wanted it. 

It took some finagling once the new term started, and he had been wise enough to not overload his courses as he had in the past. A part-time shift isn’t the commitment he’d have enjoyed if he were entirely free from educational responsibilities, but it’s something he can manage. 

Perhaps the most surprising part of joining the response team, is that Maria-Theresa from the academic office is also there. “I don’t have homework to distract me,” she says when he calls her out on her presence. “What’s your excuse?” 

“I need something to distract me from homework,” he replies. She rolls her eyes, and very quickly he and their usual driver: Aiden, become friends. Nicky follows Maria-Theresa’s lead as he would follow Andy’s. She’s been doing this far longer than he has, and though some experiences remind him of his previous work in field medicine, each one is new. He fetches equipment when she asks for them, he attends to their temporary patients when she needs him to. They end up side by side most nights falling into an easy pattern that Nicky finds charmingly familiar. 

He knows what it’s like to be on a team, and working like this is more comforting than he ever knew possible. Even if most of their calls are for the elderly who fell down and just needed to be checked over, even if there are some days where all they did was wait at the station house with nothing to do but read or write notes, it’s perfect.

He goes home, sleeps in the bed he’ll one day share with Joe again, and he dreams of his family. Dreams of Joe listening to him talk about his day. Dreams of Joe nodding and asking questions. Most nights, the dreams even stay pleasant. There’s no darkness. No blood. No gore. Joe smiles and tells him how proud of him he is. Nicky wakes up with a matching smile on his face. 

The nights where Joe tosses him plastic anatomical model pieces and asks him to name them, where Joe gives Nicky his heart, still bleeding and bloody, shift too. Now Nicky walks to him. Kneels by his side. He creates an incision in Joe’s chest. He separates the flesh and muscle. He surgically places the heart right back where it belongs. It beats there, wild and alive. Joe stares up at him. “Not yet,” Nicky tells him. “Not yet. We’re not ready yet.” 

And Joe will look back, tired and in pain. He’ll place his hand on Nicky’s bloody palm and say: “I know. See you when you’re ready. It’ll be okay.”

* * *

It’s three years after Nicky left home when he gets a text message from Joe unlike all the others. _I talked to Dr. Tran today about what it felt like being buried alive. I think I liked speech therapy better._

It’s such a _Joe_ thing to say, Nicky shakes his head when he reads it. This doctor held on far longer than Nicky could have ever imagined anyone _could._ Three years with all their nonsense, and finally, she got Joe to open up. To talk to someone. He’d call it a miracle if he didn’t know just how tireless she must be working. Just how hard she must be applying herself. 

He was able to shadow a few psychiatrists during their preliminary meetings with volunteer students not too long ago. During a round-table discussion conference, he even heard how psychiatrists managed their caseloads and balanced the strain of their clients’ traumas in their own lives. 

His advisor has been making it increasingly clear that Nicky will soon need to choose a specialty for his final two years of the program. He can’t teeter between Psychiatry and Psychology anymore, nor can he attempt to balance it with his preference for triage. Soon, all of those lessons will become incompatible in a group. He’ll need to make a choice. Physical health or mental health. He already knows that there’s little point in choosing psychiatry. He’ll never have clients to whom the administration of drugs will have any effect. Prescribing medicine will do nothing for him, his family, or their futures. 

But he doesn’t feel as though he understands the human mind nearly as well as he’d like to. Doesn’t feel as though he’s answered the questions he’d wanted when he first started this collection of classes and interests. 

He sets an appointment with Dr. Tran not long after he received Joe’s text, and when he finally meets her, she’s exactly what he imagined. She’s kind, but there’s a strength in her that overrides every other emotion. She cares, and it’s that caring that Nicky knows makes the best mental health care practitioners. In physical health, whether the doctor cared or not can be irrelevant to their skill. But in mental health, the caring is what matters. It’s all that matters. 

When he tells her his story, she listens. She takes shorthand notes that are merely so she can keep track of what he’s saying, not transcribing word for word. And when he finishes, she sets her pen down and seems to consider his quandary. “Why did you ask me for this meeting?” Linh asks him, because they’ve decided that she’s _Linh_ now. 

“So I could talk it out loud until I found my answer,” he admits. 

“You could have done that with your peers. Maria-Theresa or Aiden, for instance. You're close with them. They'd have listened to you.” 

“Perhaps.” He _has_ spoken to Maria-Theresa about it. He knows her opinion. He’s damn good with his hands, and if he advanced from paramedic to triage specialist in a hospital setting, he could do a world of good. It hadn’t been enough of an answer for him, though. 

“So why call _me?”_

That answer, is harder to say out loud. “Validation,” he admits. “I think it is validation.”

“Validation for what?” 

He’d half hoped she was a worse doctor, that she’d provide him with some leading question that he could just affirm and not have to actually speak. He knows she’s not a bad doctor, though. Knows that she was thoroughly vetted by Copley _and_ Andy, and that Andy would never allow them to come to harm. “Validation that I’m doing all right. That I am well enough. Good enough to…” he grimaces. “If I continue, I’ll get my doctorate. My medical license. It will be official, but what good is being official to me? In one hundred years I’ll need to do this again. And again. And again. So why should I need to finish now? I know what to do if someone is hurt in the field and I can help them. So...I…”

“Are you asking me if you should drop out of school?” He winces at the phrasing. When he looks sheepishly at the camera, he’s met with a look of unerring patience. 

Maria-Theresa may have shared his sister’s name, but the look on Linh’s face he’s only ever seen on his sister’s face. When she listened to him babble about why he’d taken the hound to help him catch frogs in the stream. When he told her he wanted to become a priest. When he said goodbye. 

Linh adjusts in her seat. “Nicky...your life is yours to live as you want to. You chose medicine to help others. To help Andy, and to understand Quynh. And yes, the latter does benefit you to the extent that _you_ can manage your expectations around her, but it does the most help for Quynh. You’ve said yourself, helping others makes you _feel_ whole. But you’ve also said that too often you don’t do enough for yourself. You don’t look after your own interests. I think you know what you enjoy doing, and I think the reason you’re avoiding saying it, is because you’re worried how others will take it. Them before you. As always.”

“You’re telling me to be more selfish?” 

“I’m telling you to be kinder to _yourself._ Do you _actually_ care if you have to come back in a hundred years to do a medical refresher? More to the point, do you really think it will _take_ one hundred years? It’s only been thirty since the last time you went to school.” 

No. He doesn’t think he’d wait that long. It had been a flimsy excuse. A deflection poorly thought out. He knows what he’d want to do. Knows what he’d choose. If he weren’t immortal, if he could go somewhere and just stay there for fifty years working in one place. He knows what he’d choose. “It’s impractical,” he says. “I can’t ignore what I am.” 

“Why do you have to?” Linh asks him. “What do you want most right now?” 

_To be of use,_ he thinks. _To help. To make the world a better place._

“I want to finish it.” She nods, as if she’d expected that the whole time. “Emergency doctor,” he continues, just to be clear. Her expression doesn’t change. 

“You’re going to be a wonderful doctor, Nicky.” 

She doesn’t say that his family will wait for him. But a part of him has always known for sure, they always will.


	16. Chapter 16

Booker and Nile move out of the safe house and into their own home. It’s a cozy two bedroom apartment and they share it like two college students. Joe visits and rolls his eyes at the stacks of pre-made food boxes and candy that make the gastronomist in him gag. Booker squeezes an ungodly amount of ketchup over his vibrantly yellow macaroni and cheese and gives him a look that makes it entirely clear that the more Joe judges, the more Booker will add. Joe pointedly looks the other way. 

Quynh handled their departure well. She spoke with Dr. Tran on what it meant, and she didn’t rage or start taking potshots at them when they did come together. She hadn’t been fond of the idea to begin with. Had asked them repeatedly if they were going to leave for good, only to be told repeatedly that they weren’t. 

The transition started slowly, of course. The apartment was acquired, then Nile would spend one day there alone and come back. Booker the next day. They alternated for a week or so before they both spent the night there, then came back. Then it extended to every two days. Three days. Four. Once they pulled the plug on staying the night, the team settled in for daily engagements. Either a team lunch, or dinner, or training session that ensured everyone had a chance to see one another. 

Now, they have a general routine. Training sessions and the occasional family dinner, but nothing so rigid that it feels like Booker and Nile never left at all. The safe house is quieter without them there, but it feels less tense. Nile never forgave Quynh for what she did, and Booker’s acceptance only seemed to come around after he received his family portrait. Even so, without them living with Quynh, some of the natural despair that always seemed to fill the safe house’s halls dissipated.

Joe’s even started to take a few days every now and then to stay at the Briar Patch. He checks in with Andy, to confirm how she’s managing, but Andy only seems to be more and more confident in her position as time goes on. None of them will forget what Quynh did, but they  _ are  _ learning how to live with it. 

It’s during one of his trips to the Briar Patch that he starts playing with the idea of making the move more permanent. Finalized. He brings it up to his little brother and sister when next he visits their apartment, curious to their opinions. “I’m thinking of not coming back to England after our missions,” he tells them, pointedly ignoring Booker’s atrocious dining habits. Nile’s not much better. She made a peanut butter sandwich and sprinkled a packet of Swiss-Miss hot chocolate powder on it, calling it a Reeses Pieces Cup. 

“Where will you go?” Booker asks, though he says it as if he already knows the answer. Joe can practically hear the smile in his voice. He rolls his eyes toward the ceiling, but really: he’s glad that it’s even seen as a viable option. That not once, in all the times his family interacted with Nicky in the past four years did they ever get the impression that he wouldn’t want Joe in his life once again. 

“Malta,” he admits. Nile squeals. She throws her arms around his neck and he  _ oomphs _ , breath shoving out of him at the sudden pressure. 

“He’s going to be  _ so happy, _ ” Nile declares. 

Joe can only hope so. He doesn’t have a plan for announcing his intentions, nor does he really know if this is something that Nicky would actually want. Nicky’s program isn’t over. He won’t leave Malta until it is, and Joe would never ask him to. But at the same time, Joe has no intention of putting their missions on pause either. When a call comes in, he’ll go. Not to help Quynh, but to help the world. It’s what they do. Give back. But if Nicky isn’t comfortable with him coming and going, then it won’t matter. He’ll stay with the team. Perhaps not  _ living  _ with Quynh and Andy anymore. He can use the Briar Patch if he wants. But he wouldn’t be with Nicky. 

He closes his eyes. He misses Nicky. And this isn’t a question that can easily be conveyed via text message. Not one that he can accept silence as an answer. He needs to actually speak with his beloved. No intermediaries, no barriers. 

Naturally, it takes him almost another month before he musters the courage to actually go. Copley gives them details on a mission in Nigeria. An oil rig in the Gulf of Guinea may not be an oil rig at all, but rather a testing location for a nuclear device. Spectrometers have been picking up increased radioactive signals coming from the rig, and the company that owns it only has a tangential relationship to the oil business. They’re being sent to Lagos first in order to track and assess the on-shore side of the business and confirm if it’s legitimate. 

He listens to the mission plan, the set up, and the way they intend to go about it. When Andy’s finished consolidating Copley’s data and explaining how they’ll proceed, all Joe has to says is: “I’ll meet you there.” Andy and Quynh don’t question it, but Nile grabs Booker’s arm and gives him a kind of excited look that has Booker rolling his eyes. 

The flight to Malta seems to take forever. It’s only a few hours, but Joe fidgets the whole while. His toes tap anxiously against the floor of the plane. And even when he gets behind the wheel of his rental, he can’t help but tap his fingers against the wheel, the door, the arm rest. It’s late when he gets in. But not  _ too  _ late. He doesn’t know Nicky’s schedule. Doesn’t know if he’s at school, or at the station house, or at home. He drives aimlessly for a little bit, going from one place to another in hopes that he gets inspiration. 

Eventually he parks his car and just walks the streets of Valletta, meandering through the school campus and the nearest ambulance port. It’s luck alone that ends his search. Someone shouts “Nicky! Maria-Theresa!” and he turns. A large man in a red and navy blue uniform is waving his hand frantically across a parking lot. Joe scans the scene. At the door of the station house, Nicky is there. He’s standing with a young woman, both of them holding their matching red and navy blue uniform jackets under their arms. They’re wearing the same navy blue t-shirt. Nicky turns. “You both done with your shift?” 

“You know we are, Aiden!” the woman calls over, rolling her eyes as she and Nicky meander toward the man. 

“Come have a drink with me.” 

“I have to study,” Nicky refuses, but he’s smiling. Happy. He looks so happy. He’s relaxed, body loose and at ease. Aiden shakes his head. Makes an x with his arms. 

“All you do is study, come drink with me.” 

“How will I ever catch up with this one if I don’t study?” Nicky asks, nudging Maria-Theresa with his arm. 

“Well that’s even more of a reason to go for a drink,” Maria-Theresa replies. “If you keep up with all those books you’ll make me look bad. 

They’re friends, Joe knows in an instant. Not just acquaintances that Nicky made to fit into society, but actual friends. People he loves, and will mourn when it’s time for him to leave. When the eternal problem of their immortality forces him to step back to let the world spin on without his participation. 

Nicky plays with them. He teases and jokes. He smiles. He laughs from his heart. He’s  _ living  _ here, not merely surviving. Every part of Joe’s body fills with warmth. Even the melancholy knowledge that this moment is temporary does nothing to overcome the blessed warmth that overwhelms him. He takes a step back. It’s not the right time to intrude. 

His friends have earned their time with him. He’ll go back to the airport. Fly to Lagos and get their hotel ready in advance. He’ll come back another day. When Nicky isn’t clasping his hands over his chest and asking how Maria-Theresa, a representative of his school, could encourage drinking over studying. 

Joe takes another step back. He twists his foot, ready to turn and walk away. One final look. Just one. He memorizes Nicky’s face. His joy. It’s more than enough to keep him going until Nicky’s ready to come to him first. “Don’t you start with me, Nicky.” Maria-Theresa scolds. Joe huffs a laugh. She sounds just like Andy. 

Then…

It’s impossible that Nicky heard it. Impossible that the sound was loud enough to draw attention to him. And yet, Nicky’s eyes flicker to the side, just long enough to catch sight of where Joe’s loitering. He needs to double take to confirm what he’s seeing. His easy going smile fading into something like wonder as he stares openly in Joe’s direction. Joe winces, knowing he’s missed his chance to slip away entirely undetected. 

He still doesn’t want to intrude. Doesn’t want to ruin his night. He places his hand on his heart and bows his head ever so slightly, then turns. Forces himself to walk away. His car isn’t far, but every step feels like it takes all his energy to make. He almost imagines hearing his name behind him. 

But he certainly doesn’t imagine a startled voice shouting, “Nicky!? Where are you going!?” nor the sound of running feet behind him. He turns, twisting to see if maybe, just maybe, he won’t have to walk away.

Nicky is there. Running after him, uniform jacket deserted in the parking lot with his friends. He stops only feet away from Joe. An arms length away. Joe’s lips part. Nicky isn’t saying anything, just breathing hard. Sweat on his brow. He bends over just a little to catch his breath, but his beautiful eyes never leave Joe’s face. Taking a deep breath, Joe plants his feet. Makes his lips form the kindest smile he knows how to make. And he says: “Nicolo.” Perfectly. Flawlessly. Tears spring to Nicky’s eyes. He takes the last steps closer. His arms wrap around Joe’s neck. Joe clings on around his waist. He breathes in Nicky’s smell, slightly clinical and clean even beneath the fresh sheen of sweat that broke out during his sprint. 

Nicky fits against Joe’s body like he’s meant to be there. Like he’s always been meant to be there. They fold against each other, two halves of a broken locket, made whole. He sighs against Nicky’s hair. Cradles this precious body against his heart, and relishes the way Nicky clings just as tight. With just as much intention. He says it again. “Nicolo.” The urge to kiss grows too much, so he traces his lips against the smooth expanse of Nicky’s neck. “Nicolo.” Then one behind Nicky’s ear. “Nicolo.” His temple. 

He tries to pull away, but Nicky doesn’t release his neck. So he stays there, basking in the warmth of Nicky’s body in conjunction with the pleasure of Nicky’s joy. Footsteps approach. He tilts his head up. Maria-Theresa and Aiden are there, Nicky’s jacket in tow. They’re staring as if they have no idea what they’re supposed to say, what they’re supposed to do. They hold the jacket as if it’s a lost child desperate to return to its parent. “Nicolo,” Joe whispers. He kisses Nicky’s head once more, then firmly starts to pull back. 

He’s released, but only so Nicky can shift. He slides one arm down Joe’s, his fingers intertwine with Joe’s on instinct. It’s perfection. Nicky twists and sees Maria-Theresa and Aiden. He flushes bright. Embarrassed, but also immovable. He doesn’t try to hide their hands. Doesn’t seem the least bit ashamed by his behavior. Joe wants to kiss him all over his face. “This is my husband,” Nicky says. “Joe, these are my friends: Maria-Theresa and Aiden.” 

_ “Your husband?”  _ Aiden repeats, mouth dropping in shock. 

“When did you get married?” Maria-Theres asks, skipping shock and going straight to suspicion. 

“An eternity ago,” Nicky replies. 

“So when you said you were going home to study the human body…” Aiden looks Joe up and down and Nicky blushes so hard that Joe can feel his palm starting to sweat. He covers his face with his off hand as the embarrassment grows to an all time high. It’s so maddeningly endearing that Joe can’t help but grin. 

“I never said I was going to study the human body,” Nicky moans behind his fingers. 

“But you  _ are,”  _ Aiden’s brows wiggle. 

Maria-Theresa steps forward. She’s scowling openly now. “Where have you  _ been  _ for the past four years?” Aiden winces at the tone, and Nicky’s hand falls from his face. 

“There was a family emergency,” Nicky says. “We’ve been separated.” She doesn’t seem mollified. 

“For  _ four years?  _ Every holiday? Every vacation? You never went to him, you never mentioned him, you—”

“Theresa.” She turns the full force of her displeasure toward Nicky, and he outlasts her. It isn’t until she hands him his jacket and turns her gaze away does he go on. “Thank you.” Then, to Aiden he says, “Sorry I can’t go tonight. Maybe another time.” 

Joe winces. He squeezes his fingers around NIcky’s hand. “Nicky you can—”

“—Let’s go home, Joe,” Nicky says. He doesn’t have it in him to argue against that. He nods, and lets Nicky lead the way back to Dingli. 

* * *

It’s like nothing has changed.

It’s like everything has changed. 

They lay on the roof of their house, climbing a very nice ladder that hooks into place and doesn’t wobble at all. Nicky spreads out a blanket beneath them, and they lay back to look up at the stars together. Their hands clasp between them. 

“Not everything must have changed since the last time you practiced medicine,” Joe says, thoughtful and slow. 

“Some things  _ are  _ the same,” Nicky concedes, grinning. “Some just have modifications. My professor could not believe it was my first time stitching a wound closed.” Joe grins. He can just imagine that. Imagine how Nicky dedicated himself to the task, and then bashfully pretended he just happened to be a naturally gifted physician. Not one born of one thousand years of understanding how the world works. 

“You have no trouble in...the wards?” He’s not sure if it’s the right word for it. But in his mind, he conjures a picture of Kozak’s lab. Being strapped down with devices attached to his fingers and chest. The feeling of being poked and prodded with needles. 

Nicky seems to understand what he’s referring to. He shakes his head, stroking his thumb back and forth along Joe’s palm. “It’s interesting. I feel as though I have...an understanding on what things feel like. How to ensure that no one is hurt when I must treat them similarly. They say the best teachers are the ones who show you what not to do.”

“I’d say she’s the b-best teacher then.” He glowers up at a particularly bright star for the fumble. He’d been working so hard. It’s the first one all evening. 

Nicky rolls on his shoulder, still holding on tight. “You’re doing so well,” he praises. Slowly, Joe rolls over too. They face each other. He looks so wonderful. Joe takes his off hand and traces the curve of Nicky’s jaw with his softest touch. 

“You too.” 

“I never wrote back,” Nicky grimaces. Biting his lip. Joe lets his thumb fall to that lip, easing it back out from between Nicky’s teeth. 

“I understood.”

“All I could think of to say was that I wanted you to come to me. But...if I said that I would have just made things worse.” 

“I understand. I never...I never wanted to force you.”

They’re quiet for a moment. Words falling asleep between them as they familiarize themselves with touch. Smell. Sight. Joe relishes the feeling of Nicky’s hair. The neat beard that’s silky smooth beneath his palm. He inhales the sweet smell of Nicky’s body and he plants it in his mind as a scent to remember. 

“You’d have left...if I hadn’t seen you.” It’s not a question, but it feels like one. His curiosity drizzles over the words like a fine glaze. He’s shy about it, as though he doesn’t have the right to ask. As if Joe would ever hide anything from him. 

He nods, feeling his hair pull underneath his head as it rubs against the blanket. “You seemed so happy tonight. I didn’t want to interrupt.” 

Nicky frowns. He glances up to the sky, watching stars as he considers a response. Joe lets him think. Everything had happened so fast he wonders if Nicky even thought of what the future would bring. He’d need to explain Joe properly to Maria-Theresa and Aiden. Need to explain the kind of family emergency that would keep devoted husbands from each others’ sides. 

“I was happy,” Nicky agrees. “But you make me happy too. Tomorrow, maybe I will go out for a drink with my friends. But you...how long are you staying?” 

Joe’s so grateful that Nicky didn’t ask if he was here for good. He’s not sure he’d have the strength to argue with him over the complexities of the ultimatum he’d been following as best he could until that moment. He swallows though, and knows that this won’t be an answer Nicky necessarily enjoys either way. “I...I still want to...go on missions with the team,” he feels anxiety starting it’s familiar grip on his throat. Feels how it’s threatening to choke off his words. He settles himself with a deep breath. He lets his words rest gently on his tongue, and he breathes them to life with a survivor’s kiss. “But when I’m not with them, would it be all right...if I came home to you?” 

Nicky sits up. His hand still clings to Joe’s, but he sits up. He looks down at Joe until Joe rises to be on a level with him. Their off hands join now, forming a circle with their bodies. “You’re going to stay?” he asks. 

It sounds so full of hope that Joe knows immediately that Booker and Nile had been right. Nicky wants this. Wants to do this with him. Always. He smiles. Smiles, because he can’t think to do anything else except smile. He nods, nods and wriggles just a little closer, grinning as he says: “Yes, please, can I stay? I’ll need to go when they call. I’ll be gone sometimes for a few days or weeks at a time, but after. After I’m done with a job, can I come back? Be with you?” 

“You don’t want me to go back?” 

This time, the question catches Joe off guard. He blinks, trying to rationalize where it’s coming from, but it seems so unnatural that he shakes his head. “Do you  _ want  _ to? I thought...I thought you wanted this,” he nudges his chin out toward the garden, but he means  _ everything.  _ Malta, the university, Maria-Theresa and Aiden. Eventually, maybe, a hospital somewhere that Nicky could work in for a dozen years or more before quietly relocating somewhere else. An emergency room where Nicky could actively give back and do good in the world, where he doesn’t need to worry about Quynh or trying to fight by Quynh’s side. “You know I would take you back if you wanted me to, but I… I didn’t think that...that...you…” He fumbles, falters. Doesn’t know if he’s overstepped or presumed. 

“I don’t think I’m ready to go back…” Nicky says. “But I never thought...they’re family.” 

“So are you,” Joe reminds. “Book and Nile...they’ve been, they’ve been doing this thing, rotating, moving out. And everything is, it’s okay. It’s going okay. I’ve been, trying too. To st-stay out and not have, have it be a big deal. And I think...I think it’d be okay. And I think...think it’d be good to try. I can come-come to you and...is that okay?” He wants so desperately for it to be okay. He wants so desperately for him to say  _ yes.  _

“Andy will be okay, without anyone else? There with her? She’ll be okay?” Nicky shifts a little closer. Their knees are touching how. Joe feels his heart pound hard in his chest. He nods. Nods and squeezes Nicky’s hands. 

“Yeah, yeah I think it’ll be okay. So...are you...would you...can I...?

And Nicky is there. Arms back around his neck. Hugging him tight. He’s sitting in Joe’s lap, and Joe’s arms wrap tight around him. He laughs. Laughs and rocks that amazing man he fell in love with almost a full millennium ago. Rocks him and kisses the side of his face. His head. His brow. His lips. Nicky kisses him back. 

Kisses and laughs and cries and the delight overwhelms Joe so much. He can barely focus his joy is all encompassing. He wants to scream with joy. Wants to hoot with laughter. He takes Nicky and rolls them over, tousling on their little blanket like the greeks. Nicky throws his head back, narrowly avoiding braining himself of the hard stone of the roof, laughing in such glee that it’s a continual positive feedback loop. His joy amplifies Joe’s, Joe’s joy amplifies Nicky’s. On and on it goes. 

They play together, kissing and wrestling and giggling like the children they used to be. The whole world is theirs and it’s beautiful. 

It’s whole. 

It’s  _ theirs.  _

* * *

Joe only has one day before he needs to fly south. But he makes the best of it. He holds onto Nicky whenever he has a chance, kissing his face and drawing him into his chest so he can feel their hearts beating in unison—separated only by loose cloth, the scant sheets of skin, and some inconsequential muscle and bone. 

Nicky rarely lets go of his hand. He drags him from place to place. He takes him to campus and shows him all the classrooms where he spends his time. The study room where he first made friends with his cohort (all of whom are apparently named Luke or some derivative of as far as Joe can tell). He takes him to the station house and properly introduces Joe to Maria-Theresa and Aiden. They all go out to eat for lunch and Joe basks in the stories they tell him of Nicky and his paramedic-brilliance. How good he is, how kind he is, how no one can understand how he just seems to  _ know  _ things, and how they equally don’t understand how Nicky can spend every waking moment studying. 

Joe’s seen Nicky spend ten hours fighting endless eye-fatigue so he could take a shot on a militant almost two miles away. Seen him run the numbers in his head for the wind and the spin of the earth as he squeezed his finger on the trigger and killed a man who’d been responsible for the deaths of thousands. Joe has no trouble at all imagining Nicky before some harmless books learning how to follow the first law of medicine: to do no harm. 

At night, Joe wraps his arms around Nicky and breaths him into his lungs. He embraces the very thought of Nicky into his body. He’s going to do this. He’s going to go on a mission, and when it’s done: he’s coming home to this bed. This man. This life. He’s going to make dinner for when Nicky is too busy to cook. He’s going to bring coffee to the station house so that Nicky’s team doesn’t have to fight through exhaustion. He’s going to wake up each day with Nicky warm and present in his arms. 

And when he has to go on missions, Nicky will halfheartedly put up a fight like he’s doing it now. He’s going to whine as Joe kisses up his neck, trying to wake him up so he can leave properly. “I have to go,” he says against the shell of Nicky’s ear. 

“No,” Nicky grumbles. Nicky clings to Joe’s arm and hugs it tight to his chest. He shakes his head and burrows it into his pillow. 

It’s so terribly endearing that Joe can’t help think of their daughter, Saifa. She never liked being awoken. She always put up a fuss. Clearly, it’s a learned trait, because Joe cannot remember Nicky ever being so determined to stay in bed before. Joe’s always been the one to whine and plead. But here’s Nicky, holding his arm in a vice grip and being petulant. “Nicolo,” Joe whispers. 

“No.” 

“Nico-looooo,” Joe nips at Nicky’s ear. Biting it just enough to make Nicky’s nose twitch in irritation. Nicky’s right eye cracks open. He delivers a passionate glare for a man who is not awake enough to seem fully threatening. Grinning, Joe drops into song, placing teasing bites and kisses along Nicky’s ear as he plays. “Nicolo-mini, Nic-o-lo-mini...Nic-o-lo-mini Nicooo, Lo-mini Nicolo, Mini Nico-lo mini, Nicolo Mini Niiii,”

“I swear to God if you don’t—” Joe kisses him on the lips, cutting off the curse before it could get started. 

“Blasphemer,” he teases. “You were speaking blasphemy just now.” 

“You will never sing that again.” 

“Lo-mini Nicolo, mini Nic-o-lo mini, Nic-o-lo-mini-Ni.” Nicky delivers a very gentle headbut to Joe’s chin and finally sits up, tossing Joe off him. “Dr. Tran had me sing it for practice,” Joe reveals. 

“If you think that’s going to endear me to it…”

“No, but I  _ can  _ sing it faster.” He waggles his brows suggestively. Nicky rolls his eyes and shakes his head. 

“When does your plane leave?” 

“Three hours. I should get to the airport now though.” He traces his hand along Nicky’s sides, smiling when he finds the one ticklish spot that Nicky still has after all these years. His lover pulls away ever so slightly, slapping at his hands and scowling. His slaps turn more fond though, after a moment. Fond enough to collect Joe’s poor fingers into their blessed grip and be raised to Nicky’s mouth for a gentle kiss. 

“If you text me again…” Nicky fumbles, looking so sweet and shy. “I’ll answer.” 

That has Joe rolling off the bed to fetch his phone. Nicky laughs, pressing his hands to his face and shaking his head as Joe fires off one  _ I love you _ after another. Nicky’s phone jingles happily on the bed stand above  _ One Thousand and One Nights _ , and Nicky just laughs and laughs into his palms as Joe keeps the texts going.  _ I love you, I love you, I love you.  _

“Go away, I’m not texting you if you’re still here.” 

“Tell me you love me,” Joe demands, slipping his phone into his pocket so he can crawl over his lover’s body and kiss his way up Nicky’s sternum to his lips. Even unwashed and unbrushed, Nicky’s perfect and lovely beneath him. 

Hands dropping from his face, Nicky’s head tilts ever so slightly to the left. His lips spread in his most genuine smile, full of fondness and love. In his first tongue, then in Joe’s, he says: “I love you, Yusuf. I love you.” He leans up and kisses Joe’s lips. Continues in the old dialect of Joe’s people. “I have loved you since the moment you came to me and asked me to wake for you, and I will love you long after our time comes and we finally are allowed to grow old. I will love you in this world, and the next, and if you don’t stop leaning on my bladder I’m going to piss myself—get  _ off.”  _

Joe politely does just that. He’s still grinning when he trudges back down to his car a few minutes later. The feeling of Nicky’s lips never fading, no matter how long it takes to fly to Lagos. 

He feels alive. More alive than he had since he first went to Booker’s apartment to apologize, all those years ago. 

And feeling alive, feels so  _ good.  _

* * *

He meets the team in a nice hotel with wonderful sight-lines and a comfortable bed. Nile takes one look at him and grins so bright that he can’t help but match it. Her arms wrap around him and she squeals just like she had when he’d announced he was going to Malta. She asks him all about it, and he tells her. Tells her about his plan, about how Nicky is doing, about Maria-Theresa and Aiden. 

Booker gives him a fist bump when he sees him, and that’s all there is to it. Joe embraces Andy and even though she hadn’t been entirely privy to his plans, she sniffs him loud enough that when she pulls back she looks pleased. “You saw him?” she asks. 

“He’s doing good,” Joe confirms. “He’s not coming back,” he adds just in case, “But he’s doing good.” 

“Good. Good, I’m so glad. Good.” 

When he goes to greet Quynh, she seems to have understood that something’s different than it once was. He sits next to her and asks her about her flight, and she tells him. She waits for him to get around to his announcement, and when he does, he waits for her response. “You’ll still come...out with us?” she asks. 

“Yes, same as Booker and Nile. I’ll just be going home to him when we’re done.” 

“And...you’ll be happier like that?” 

“Yes.” 

“Good,” she says. “You...you belong together. Like...Like Andy and I. You two belong together.” She hugs him then, and he hugs her back. She doesn’t ask if she can visit Nicky. Consistently, through all the years of conversation that their family has had with Nicky since he left, there’s been one thing they always knew: he didn’t want to be around her. Quynh even admitted once, that Nile had been right. If the roles had all been reversed, if everything had changed. She wouldn’t have wanted to live with the witch hunters who threw the love of her life into the ocean. 

Andy goes over the mission with them. They get ready to storm the office building of a suspected terrorist, and Joe’s mind plays fantasies of the future as they get ready to go. 

And it’s not that he’s distracted, because even if he was that would only account for  _ Joe  _ missing the threat. It’s just bad luck. Bad luck, and not nearly enough information. Joe barely has a chance to take one step into the Bad Guy’s Evil Lair, when something triggers a great concussive force sends him hurtling in the opposite direction, and his world goes dark. 

* * *

Nicky’s cell-phone buzzes quietly with a call from James Copley. But he’s on an ambulance, tending to an eighty-seven year old woman who fell in her driveway and may have a broken hip. His phone dies before the end of his shift. He plugs it in when he gets home, but falls asleep on the couch reading about surgery. His text book lays flat on his chest as he dreams of Joe waking him with a kiss. Whispering in his ear.  _ I’m home early, _ and holding him as he finishes his homework. 

He doesn’t see the message until twenty-four hours after every single member of his family failed to make their designated check-in for a mission that had gone horribly, horribly, wrong. 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> The song Joe sings is called Piccolo Mini and it's a tongue twister that you're supposed to say steadily faster and faster until you fumble.


	17. Chapter 17

“I mean, the good news is we were right: they  _ are  _ playing with plutonium in a not-fun way,” Joe says as he tugs at the cuffs around his wrists. Quynh doesn’t think this is particularly funny. In fact, she’s quite certain that this is the worst thing that could happen. Her hands hurt from how hard she’s pulled at the bands around her wrists. She’s tried sliding them off, ignoring the way her skin peels around the metal and the blood streaming down her fingers. Andromache keeps talking to her, telling her it’s going to be fine, don’t worry, everything’s going to be fine. 

They’re chained up inside a nuclear facility pretending to be an oil rig in the middle of the Gulf of Guinea. Quynh can feel it each time the rig moves on the water, can hear the sounds of the water crashing against the rig’s struts.  _ Nothing  _ is fine about this situation, and nothing is going to become fine anytime soon. 

There’s a metal slab in the room with them. Quynh hadn’t exactly been paying attention when their captors brought it there. She’d been too focused on the sound of the water as it bombarded the rig. The swaying underneath their feet. She knows the team is upset about something, but none of that matters. All of it feels secondary to her. She needs to get out of here. They need to get off this rig and back to dry land. 

She pulls her hands as hard as she can. Blood squelches around her wrists. “Quynh….Quynh please, look at me, please,” Andromache says. She’s trying to reach her, but they’re tied up too far apart. They can’t touch one another. Quynh grunts as she pulls even hard. Her hands feel as though they’re on fire. She gasps, cries, and pulls some more. “Quynh—”

The door to the room opens. Someone walks in. Quynh stares at them, breathless in her agony. They’re wearing a suit. Something strange and foreign to her eye. It covers their body so much that there’s no skin visible. Nothing human to be seen. The suit is made of something plastic. When the man inside breathes, it shhoooo-hisses with each breath through a respirator. 

This person is not alone. There are others. Others who unchain Quynh’s hands from the wall and hoist her to her feet. “Where the fuck are you taking her?” Nile asks. Quyn screams. She kicks. She bites. She jerks in their arms. Blood falls on the floor. Andromache’s yelling her name, echoing it from years ago. Quynh’s vision trembles. Andromache’s voice is overdone by others. Booker and Nile and Joe. They’re all yelling, asking for answers, yelling and clacking their chains at the wall, no longer laughing at whatever Quynh never understood to be funny. 

Quynh’s dragged down the halls of the creaking structure. She looks desperately for the signs of the iron coffin that’s been lurking both in memory and reality. She sobs to herself, tugging at her wrists behind her back and dragging her feet when kicking proves fruitless. She can  _ see  _ the water. See how it reaches out all around them. Waves crash against the pillars holding the rig upright. She screams and tries to pull away from them but they drag her bloody feet down the grate-step staircase, getting closer and closer to the water below.

They do not throw her overboard. Nor do they deposit her into a coffin. Instead, they turn back toward the interior of the ship once they finish descending, and the plastic men hoist her up as they enter a room. She’s laid out on a table and strapped down. Her cuffed hands are jerked into position in front of her body, but even when she tries to pull her arms out of their grasp, she can’t. She’s pinned into place - her body forming a cross. Needles poke at her skin, technology descends upon her. The plastic men speak to one another and Quynh sobs harder. 

She can still hear the gulf. It’s coming. It’s coming now, faster than ever before, it’s coming. The plastic men hold something over her body. They move it from head to toe. A clicking sound echoes loudly above her, almost challenging the roar of the water, but not quite managing to overpower it. 

“Andromache?” Quynh whispers. Her lips tremble and her breath shatters as it leaves her lungs. The plastic men don’t talk to her. They leave, flicking a switch and turning the lights off so all she can see is the soft glow of monitors to her side and little else. “Andromache?” 

_ Please,  _ she thinks.  _ I don’t want to be alone.  _

Nothing but the water responds. Whooshing all around, inviting her to come back home beneath the waves. 

* * *

The door opens slowly, next time. Quynh jerks on the bed, tugging her wrists at straps that don’t move. She blinks rapidly past the tears and the terror, breathing sharp and fast in desperate hope that it’s one of her family members. That they broke out, and are here to free her. 

She’s right, in a way. It  _ is  _ one of her family members. Nicolo stands there, dressed in a black wetsuit with a backpack wrapped tight around his shoulders waist. He has a gun up. It hesitates when it crosses over her body, but he finishes sweeping the room with ruthless efficiency even as she whispers his name. Only when he’s certain there’s no one there but her, does he finally look back at her. He doesn’t aim his gun back at her chest, but he doesn’t come any closer. 

“Nicolo…” she doesn’t know what to say. She pulls at her hands. He looks at the straps. The machines behind her head. He frowns long and deep. He still doesn’t come near. 

“Where are the others?” he asks. 

Quynh trembles. He could leave her here, she realizes. He could leave. She could tell him what she knows, and he could leave her here and never look back. Could get the rest out. Say he cleared the structure and that she hadn’t been on it. He could be done with her. He could leave her to the ocean just like she’d feared from the outset. And why wouldn’t he? After everything she’d done. Everything she’d perverted in an attempt to keep him close. He could leave her. 

Every part of her body starts to shake. Her head twitches, her lips open and close. She feels like she’s going to throw up, or have a fit. Her eyes blink spastically. She shakes her head. “Quynh,” Nicolo says. He sounds closer. She tries to focus on him, but it’s so hard. The sound of the ocean keeps rising. Keeps beckoning. It doesn’t matter if this is a gulf they’re in, it’s all the ocean eventually. And it will never let her go. It will never let her be free. “Quynh, where’s Andy?” 

_ Andy.  _

Quynh tries to look at his face. Tries to see what’s there. What’s not there. And Andromache is in that room. With her hands tied to a pole and her worst memory reshaping it in front of her eyes. Andromache can’t stay in that room. Joe and Nile and Booker. They can’t stay in that room. They have to get off the rig. They can’t be here when the ocean claims them. When the storm comes and sinks them all to the maddening depths. “Up-up stairs,” she tells him. “Th-they’re up-upstairs.”  _ Please don’t leave me,  _ she thinks. Prays. She looks up at Nicolo, who shouldn’t be here.  _ Couldn’t  _ be here. How did he find them? This isn’t the building that they’d stormed. This isn’t the rendezvous they’d gone to. “How...are you here?” 

At this, Nicolo starts to unbind her wrists from the table she’d been forced on. He unwinds the harsh straps that have left deep indentations on her flesh. “Copley put a tracker in your kit,” he tells her. “So if something happens, you won’t get lost. So...we can find you.” Quynh stares at him. Nicolo doesn’t look back. He undoes her feet next. Circles around to her other hand when it becomes clear she isn’t doing it herself. He pauses before he touches the straps though, staring at the strange clicking device the plastic men had used earlier. 

“What...is that?” she asks. It takes so much energy to sit up. It takes so much strength, but she does it. She sits up. She undoes the arm that Nicolo had neglected in his distraction. He picks up the device and presses a button, aiming the stick towards her. It clicks loudly and quickly. He waves it head to toe, head to toe, the little clicking just gets louder. 

“It’s a Geiger-counter,” he replies once he’s done. He sets it to the side, then starts looking at the monitors that she’d been connected to. The numbers that mean nothing to her at all. She pulls off the stickers and the probes that they’d forced on her skin. The numbers blink out and he tilts his head toward her. 

“I don’t...I don’t know what that is,” she tells him. 

“It tests for how much radiation something has. You’re completely irradiated. What’d you do?” He pauses, shakes his head. “What did  _ they  _ do?” 

Quynh isn’t sure which ‘they’ he means. The team? Or the plastic men. “We woke up in a room, there was metal.” 

“I’m sure there was,” he mutters under his breath. “Can you move?” She nods and slips from the table. Immediately her head spins. It spins and she tips to the side. His arms snap out to catch her. They freeze there, statues in the dark. Finally her head stops spinning. She regains her own balance, he steps back and away. He’s tense as he looks toward the door. “Can you lead me to them?” he asks. He refuses to look at her. 

She opens her mouth to reply, but the rig chooses that moment to tilt just a little. The sound of the water surges up in disappointed frustration. Reminding her that it never went away. That Nicolo’s presence doesn’t change anything. That her freedom is a temporary thing. She almost feels the wet spray on her face. Her body trembles. She shakes her head. Covers her ears with her hands. 

“Hey,” he says. He leans down so that they can make eye contact. He won’t touch her, but he’s not leaving her alone. Not allowing her to retreat. “You are not going in the water,” he tells her. “We’re going to get the rest of the team, and we’re going to fly out. I have a radio. There’s a chopper not far away. It’s going to come, and we’re going to fly out. You are not going in the water. All we have to do is get to the others. Can you do that?” 

“No water?” she repeats, just to make sure. 

“No water,” he confirms. “Can you do this?” He needs her. Andromache needs her. Their family needs her. She nods. She nods and forces herself to focus. To try to beat out the image in her mind. To ignore the pain that feels like it’s ricocheting around her body. She feels so sick, but that doesn’t matter. Nothing matters except for getting out. The faster they get to the others, the faster they can call for pickup. 

She takes one wobbly step forward, then another. He taps something against her arm before she gets too far away. It’s his gun. She takes it, trembling even as she adjusts her hold. She misses her blade. Her bow. But the gun she can use. She can do this. 

For her family, she can do this. “I’d like to keep as quiet as we can,” he tells her. He has a knife in his hand. Long and thin. “But shoot if you need to.” She nods. They can do this. 

He takes point and, quietly, they leave the room. The water of the gulf stretches out as far as the eye can see. Quynh’s breath hitches. She feels her head spin again. She stumbles back but he catches her around the wrist. Tugs her forward. “Don’t look at it,” he says. “We’re going to go to that staircase,” he points, “We’re going to go up it. We’re going to find our family, and we’re going to get them to the top of this place. We’re not going into the water.” 

“Not in the water,” she repeats. He frowns. Then, slowly, he lowers his hand to hold hers. 

“Together?” he asks her quietly. She stares at their hands. Nods. He squeezes his fingers around hers. Then he turns. He leads her to the staircase. They walk up it slowly, one step at a time. He doesn’t let her go. Instead, he speaks. He talks to her in a low voice. “Keep looking at me. Don’t look away. Don’t look out. Just keep looking at me.” 

They make it the first level up. He glances at her, but she shakes her head. They go up to the next level. Here, someone sees them. Nicolo’s hand leaves hers. This person is not a plastic man. He’s dressed in a military smart uniform, all black with a large gun. Nicolo charges him, rolling over the hard ground and bringing his knife up under the man’s chin with a fierce strike before he could so much as blink. He hadn’t known they were there before Nicolo killed him and left his body to drain. He turns back to Quynh. 

Quynh clings to the railing of the stairs. She shakes her head. He walks toward her and takes her hand. They ascend to the next level. Before they even get there, someone shouts. An alarm blares, red lights siren around them. Nicolo curses, and picks up the pace. She almost stumbles to catch up with him, but they stay together. 

They reach the correct floor, and there are more guards. Four of them. Nicolo releases her again. He dives and slashes out with his knife. She lifts his gun and fires. Someone dies and she turns to the next person. Nicky’s an efficient killer. He retrieves a dropped gun and follows her lead. If they’ve already been made there is little point in continuing to be quiet. He shoots at someone else and spins down onto his knee to aim at the final person. Both Nicky and Quynh shoot him at the same time. 

A wave hits the rig. It rocks ever so slightly and Quynh slips. She screams, feeling her back smack against the rail of the staircase. Nicky’s there, though, pulling her back and holding her from the peril. “It’s okay, It’s okay. You see? You’re fine. You’re fine. You’re not going over. You’re here, and we’re fine.” 

Quynh’s breath keeps coming in short bursts. She clings to him, squeezing onto the straps of his backpack like a lifeline. She feels wet. The wave had been big enough to splash up onto her. She hasn’t looked, but she can  _ smell  _ a storm in the sky. The water is roiling all around them. Threatening harm and damning them all. “Can you do this?” he asks her. She can barely open her eyes. 

She nods. Nods and forces herself to let go. She’s so dizzy. So very very dizzy. Nausea wheels about inside of her. She feels her body swaying dangerously, but he holds her hand. He’s going to keep her safe. Safe like she’d tried to keep him safe, but failed. Failed because all she’d ever done was harm him. Over and over and over again. 

Nicolo leads her up the final few steps. He glances back at her then onto the platform. It’s the split second of inattention that gets him shot. The bullet catches him through his left shoulder and ricochet’s out through his side. It skims along Quynh’s arm as it pierces his body. Blood sputters up from his lips and she yells as he tumbles. His back arches over the edge of the very rail he’d kept her from tipping over. His balance off from how he’d twisted to look back at her. 

He falls and she watches him fall. 

Once, in a session with Dr. Tran, she learned that the human brain can think at a speed of 70-120 meters per second, or rather 156-270 miles per hour. That’s the speed it takes for a single neuron to spark a reaction and have it be read, registered, and understood. The neurons that fired in that moment erupted in a series of thoughts and actions, none of which she fully understood. 

These are the things she thought: 

    1. At the end of this mission, Joe is going to leave and go home with Nicolo to wherever they call home. She will only see him on missions, and when he deigns to visit. 
    2. No one knows Nicolo found her. No one will know if she saves the others and leaves him to sink to the ocean floor.
    3. They never found _her_. They won’t find him. 
    4. They won’t find him. 
    5. _They won’t find him._



And when those thoughts went from her brain to her spine, issuing a command to move, she shoots the man who dared to hurt her little brother and dives off the stairs. She tracks the splash Nicky’s body made in the water, angling herself and keeping focused on just how far off she is from his uncoordinated fall. She keeps herself as perfectly aerodynamic as possible, and when her fingertips break the water, she ducks her head to keep from getting whiplashed from the force

Nicolo isn’t being dragged down by any weight aside from his own. His body is limp and unhelpful to the waves. He’s buoyant, still, until the last bit of air leaves his lungs. Quynh keeps all this in mind as she kicks hard with her legs and ignores every other part of her that screeches in sheer hysteria at the feeling of water all around her. The pressure on her back. The way her hair drags behind her, tugging at her scalp. Bubbles of air leave her mouth and it tears at her throat and her nose. Her eyes burn at the salt from the gulf. She kicks hard and harder. Her hands reach out, searching through the dark murk. 

Something knocks against her fingers. Something hard and distinctly unfishy. She kicks harder, chasing it, groping through the gloom. It’s a foot. An ankle. A leg. Her arms wrap around the body and she kicks upwards. He’s still out, hasn’t healed from the bullet that likely shattered his spine as it tore through his body. 

She grabs upwards at the water, cupping her fingers of one hand to push it down even as she frog kicks her way toward the surface. There’s so little air left in her lungs. Even this far down, she knows when her eyes start to prickle from the blackness of a loss of consciousness. She curses. Screams. She’s going to die. She’s going to die and they’re not at the surface yet. If she dies, she’ll lose him. She’ll lose him. She can’t hold on if she dies; they’ll be separated. Both of them lost at sea with no one to know what happened or where they are. 

Quynh kicks harder. Harder. As hard as she can. She scoops as much water as possible with one hand. The other clings tight to Nicolo’s immobile form that constantly threatens to drag her down. The last bit of air leaves her. She feels her lungs desperately grab for more, but all that fills her is water. Water and salt. She screams, her grip around Nicolo falters. The water laughs as it strangles her. It chants its delight in her ears as everything else falls silent and wrong.  _ She should have known better. She should have known better. She should have known better!  _

Her consciousness rests on the edge of a knife, and her throat burns as it clogs all the way to the top. She tries to squeeze her fingers around Nicolo, but knows it’s too late. They loosen. Her mind begins to flicker. She almost doesn’t feel it when Nicolo jerks back to life beside her. She hopes that he makes it to the surface. 

He’s almost there.

* * *

Quynh wakes with half of her body still in the water, the other half out of it. She jerks badly. Her head throws back and she gasps for air. Her legs kick violently, feet striking something hard and movable. It takes her far too long to hear anything beyond the roaring of the ocean. The feel of the water all around her. The taste of salt in her mouth, down her throat, burning her from the inside out. 

But when she  _ can  _ hear. She hears her name. “Quynh! Quynh! Look at me. Quynh!” There’s an arm tight around her waist. A grip so steady and so firm that despite her thrashing, it has not released her. It hasn’t abandoned her to the depths. It hasn’t let her drown. Not again. Not even when she deserves it. Not even when she never should have been freed to begin with. She should have died down there. Should have left them all alone. Should have—  _ “Quynh!”  _ She looks. 

Nicolo. Nicolo is holding her. He’s clinging to the metal emergency ladder that the oil rig has. It drops all the way into the water and then some. He’s clinging to it, and he’s clinging to her. She has no idea how long he’s been here. Holding on because he couldn’t carry her up with one hand. But he’s stayed like this through all of it. He brought her to the surface, swam all the way through the churning and crush of the waves, clung to this ladder and kept her secure. “We’re going home,” he tells her. “Let’s get out of this, find the others, and  _ go home.”  _

“Why?” she asks. “Why did you save me?” He could have let her go. Could have abandoned her. Could have left her on that table too. There’s no reason for this. None that she can see. She was  _ horrible  _ to him. She hurt him in all the worst ways, just because she wanted him close and didn’t care what he wanted for himself. He left and never came back, despite all the others being there. 

Thousands of thoughts and feelings coil through her. She cannot understand why he’s doing this. She doesn’t know what he wants. “Because you’re my sister,” he says, even though he looks lost as the words leave his mouth. “You needed my help,” he tells her, as if it could possibly be that simple. “It’s what we do,” he finishes, like it doesn’t mean everything to hear he holds her in any kind of value at all. Then, he asks, “Can you climb?” She looks up at the ladder. It’s long and straight and it’s terrifying. But the ocean is worse. The ocean is so much worse. 

He shifts so she can cling to the first rung with both hands. Her feet slip and slide as she tries to get a good grip. She needs to loop her elbows through each rung to keep from falling, but she climbs. She  _ climbs.  _ One rung after another, body shaking and trembling, she gets her feet under her and she pushes through every aching muscle and every pained inhalation. She pushes beyond the panic and fear and terror. She clings to the ladder, and she clings to his words. 

She’s his sister. She needed help. It’s what they do. 

Quynh slips only once. Her feet slide and she clings desperately to the rung hooked under her elbows. It takes so long to balance, but when she does she applies all her focus to the task. One rung after another. One rung after another. When she reaches the first platform to the bottom of the stairs, she sprawls out on its great expanse, breathing hard. He kneels at her side, just as winded but no less determined. He holds out his hand. She takes it. Together, they climb. 

Each step hand in hand, her holding to one railing, him to the other. They’ve lost their weapons, but they have each other. They will not make the same mistakes as they did before. They climb. One step after another. One step after another. They reach the level she’d been kept on, and they keep going. One. Two. Three. Four. 

She’d killed the guard that had shot Nicolo, and it doesn’t appear that any others were alerted to their presence without their final witness. The lights are still flickering, but there’s no sign of anyone else. Nicolo picks up a weapon from one of the bodies. Quynh takes another. 

She leads him to the door she’s certain the others are behind. They open it together, both guns at the ready. But there is no one except for their family. Curled up and in agony. Piles of vomit beside them and skin peeling badly. Quynh stares at them, shock tearing through her, past the waves and the ocean and the horror already faced. “What—”

“Radiation poisoning,” Nicolo says. He points to the large slab of metal. “They were testing how potent it was, when they took you away. Get Andy out now.” 

She doesn’t need to be told twice. Hurrying toward Andromache’s side, she reaches for the chains holding her hostage. Andromache isn’t moving. Isn’t conscious. Her head is lolled over. No one has spoken upon their arrival. Quynh aims carefully and shoots the gun, snapping the links and freeing her. They’ll worry about a proper removal later. Tucking one arm around Andromache’s chest and the other under her legs she hoists the most precious person in her life up onto her shoulders and leaves the room. Still, Andromache doesn’t stir. 

There’s movement behind her. Mumbled and confused voices as the others wake up. They ask how Nicolo found them, how he got there, what he’s even doing here. Nicolo talks over all of them. A few more shots ring out, and then one after the other her little brothers and sister stumble into the fresh air. Nicolo follows after them, yanking the radio from his backpack and demanding a pickup immediately. “We have to go to the helipad, now,” he tells them when he’s finished his call. “Andy  _ needs  _ a hospital.” 

“Can you help her?” Booker asks. 

“No,” Nicolo shakes his head. “She needs a  _ hospital. _ ” Quynh doesn’t understand. She also doesn’t care. 

“We need to go,” Qunyh says. Nicolo nods sharply and shoves his gun into Joe’s hands. 

“Take them there.”

“What-what about you?” Joe asks, staring at him with such naked emotion that it hurts Quynh to see. Terror, she realizes suddenly. She can see it. He’s feeling terror. 

_ “Trust  _ me, and go. I’ll be right behind you.” Joe hesitates, but Nicolo snarls at him. “GO,” and then Joe goes. He leads them up, up, up. The helipad will be at the highest most point, and they get there without passing a single living person. Instead there are just bodies. Throats slit, necks snapped, all of them lying in a line as if they never knew the one behind them had died before the next fell. Quynh's family moves slow, Booker hurls badly just before they reach the top, but he catches up to them moments later. 

Quynh hears the helicopter in the distance. She turns and sees the lights of it coming closer. They reach the helipad, and no one stops them. Not one person. It’s as if the entire place has been abandoned. 

The helicopter lands and they climb aboard. Quynh lays Andromache out on a stretcher that’s already been prepared for their use. Andromache still hasn’t regained consciousness. Joe’s waiting on the launch pad, but the wait is minimal at best. Nicky runs up the last few steps just a few moments after they have Andromache settled. He waves for Joe to board, and once Joe does, Nicolo throws himself into the helicopter and demands an immediate take off. 

Then, without so much as a moment’s hesitation, Nicolo opens the military-stocked medical cabinet in the back of the helicopter and starts looking for materials. He must see something useful, because he plucks out a syringe and a carefully rolled bag with some form of fluid in it. “Everybody take off your clothes,” he tells them. He puts the needle into Andromache’s arm and connects a line to the fluid. Looking down, he finds a bar of sorts and twirls it on the bed so it’s upright. He connects the bag to the bar and it hangs there so gravity forces the fluid down. 

No one has moved. He looks up at them. “There’s radiation on your clothes,  _ take them off. _ ” That gets them moving. They jerk out of their shirts and pants and undergarments. Nicky throws bland emergency outfits back at them. He strips Andromache too, then himself. Quynh helps tie an open backed gown around Andromache’s naked body, and when they’ve finished. He finds water bottles and gives them those as well. When he leans back over Andromache, Quynh hears him murmuring in Maltese. 

A loud explosion distracts Quynh from what he’s saying. She runs to look outside and see what happened. The oil rig that had held them all captive is more than just  _ on fire,  _ it’s in  _ pieces.  _ Large chunks of it are slipping below the waves, there’s smoke bursting out from all around it. Nile gags, she vomits noisily in a hastily provided bag. “There goes the-the-the ecosystem,” Joe murmurs, trembling as he rubs Nile’s back. 

“No,” Nicky refutes. “They never drilled. There’s no oil. The pumps were never active. It was just for the refinery.”

“What about the plutonium?” Booker asks. “The uranium?” 

“It is destroyed.” 

“How’d you manage that?” 

“I paid attention to my chemistry labs.” He doesn’t explain further. 

"Is there going to be a fall out—"

"No."

“And the assholes who did all this?” 

“I killed most when I first arrived, Quynh and I finished the rest. Anyone still there who managed to hide is now dead.” The whole while, his fingers are brushing over Andromache’s body. He checks her chest, her lungs, her temperature. He peels back her eyes and examines her gums. 

They arrive at the hospital where a throng of doctors and nurses are waiting for them. Nicolo leaps out of the helicopter and tells them Andromache’s status so quickly that Quynh can’t understand the language being spoken. 

They all stumble out of the helicopter and are escorted to a series of showers to wash off any excess radiation from their bodies. Quynh barely sees Nicolo for the rest of the day. It isn’t until much later, when they’re told that they all are miraculously suffering no ill effects from their freak encounter with uranium out at sea,  _ and  _ that Andromache is awake and doesn’t seem to be faring too badly all things considered, does Nicolo finally emerge. He’s leaning against a wall at the end of the corridor. Close enough to hear their status update, but far enough away that he almost seems to have separated himself from them. Closed himself off. His arms are crossed over his chest. He’s leaning hard on the wall beside him. Quynh imagines he must be exhausted. She knows that she isn’t the one who should ask him to get some rest. 

“He looks tired,” she tells Joe. Joe turns. He nods and gives Quynh’s shoulder a squeeze. 

“Thank you,” he says. Then he goes to Nicolo’s side and quietly starts to cajole him to the waiting room where they could get some rest. 

* * *

Seventy-two hours later, Andromache is released from the hospital with a stern request that she visit a doctor once she gets home to run some more tests and confirm that there are no long term effects. She promises she will, and Quynh knows they’ll all make sure she keeps that promise. 

They’re on the flight back to England before Nile asks, “When you guys came to find us...why were you so wet?” Quynh winces. She glances toward Nicolo. She doesn’t know what to say. How to explain. Doesn’t  _ want  _ to explain. 

“I died,” Nicolo answers for her. “I fell off the stairs and into the water. Quynh came after me and saved my life.” It’s an interesting way to put it. He died, but she saved his life. And yet, she cannot think of any better way to describe the situation. She nods, accepting it for what it is. 

“You were in the water?” Andy asks. Her voice has been tattered and low since they’d been taken. It gargles as she speaks now, and she coughs once she’s done. She sips at some water, but her eyes don’t leave Quynh. 

“I died,” she says. “Nicolo came after me, and saved my life.” She hears him huff slightly, in amusement. She smiles, but doesn’t try to engage further with him. 

They’ll never be what they once were to each other. That’s something from long ago. A treasured memory she’ll always hold dear to her heart. But this? This feels good too. She thinks...she thinks he’s okay with this. And if she doesn’t push, if she waits and listens and keeps trying to know his boundaries and how she can identify them, maybe they’ll have more of this in the future. 

_ That would be nice, _ she thinks.  _ That would be nice.  _

She’s ready to go home. 


	18. Chapter 18

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is posted relatively close to the last chapter update. If you haven't read chapter seventeen - please go back and check.

They have a conversation before they leave the hospital and Lagos, just Andy and Nicky alone in her hospital room while the others get some food. Nicky can’t quite meet her eyes. He’s been reading and re-reading her hospital chart, and the longer he avoids looking at her, the more she _knows._ “How long?” she croaks out. 

“It’s not that,” he replies. “Andy...you should be dead right now.” His fingers are squeezing the clipboard all her files are bound to. His knuckles are white. “There’s...there’s no reason you should be alive. Except…” Finally, he looks up. She holds up her arm, still covered in scabs. “But you should be dead.” He looks back at her notes. 

“Maybe I just got lucky,” she murmurs. His nose scrunches unhappily. “Nicky...you said yourself if it’s my time, then it’s my time.” 

“And if it is _not,_ then—”

“I should be dead,” she says it firmly. Sharply. Stopping his debate. “How long...do you think that I’ll...have with _that?”_

He looks back to the clipboard. His hands open and close. He shakes his head. Forces himself to meet her eyes once more and say, very quietly: “Less than a year. Maybe a few months.” 

It’s...not what she hoped for. But it makes sense. She understands. She bows her head and lets the news wash over her. “But it doesn’t make _sense,”_ Nicky says, rallying once more. He hurries to her side, Showing her her medical file as if she could actually understand a single word it says. He rushes through her radiation levels and the results of the tests they ran. “You should be dead,” he repeats. “You should have been dead before we ever got there. Maybe, maybe you did die. Maybe you died and you’re healing slowly - you always said that it takes a while to when it first starts and—”

“—Nicky.” 

He drops the file, puts his hands on her shoulders and gives her a firm shake. “Listen to me.” She listens. “When you walked into that office with the others, and you got blown up. You should have been hurt. Maybe killed. But you don’t have any bruises or broken bones, Andy. You don’t have a concussion at the very _least._ Andy, I’m not being willfully blind or hopeful, I’m telling you this isn’t _normal._ ”

There are things that Andy has always known about Nicky. He loves openly and freely. He cares so deeply that it is literally a part of his very soul. But he doesn’t lie. He doesn’t pretend. He’s a realist at the end of the day. He accepts the world around him, and he doesn’t look for hope where it might not be. Still, when she looks at him, she can’t help but look down and see the scabs still lining her arms. Can’t help but feel her throat aching badly. Can’t help but feel her stomach spasm painfully and her head buzzing. “You really think it’s something else?” she asks him. 

“When’s the last time you were hurt, before all this?” She doesn’t remember. Everyone’s been so busy making sure she never got injured on any of their missions, that she can’t actually recall. There were bruises, probably. There had to be. But she can’t remember them anymore. Can’t remember the last time she bumped into something and saw the tell-tale purpling that only started to appear after a few hours. She shrugs, helplessly, and he chews his bottom lip. “I have an idea.” Standing up, he hurries from the room. She waits, hearing his voice down the hall at the nurses station. It takes a few minutes for him to return, but when he does he’s got a strange looking packet and a kit of sorts. He lays them out on the bed beside her, ignoring the kit entirely so he can pull a pair of cylindrical objects out. 

“I want you to put this on your finger, and depress here,” he shows her. “It’s going to prick your finger with a needle and make you bleed. I’m going to do the same,” he holds up the object’s twin. 

She nods, and follows his instructions. The needle hurts as it snaps in and out of her skin, but it’s a small dot that wells with blood relatively quickly. She watches it, ever cognizant of how Nicky is timing her progress. After a few seconds, only the first small bead rests on her finger tip. It hasn’t trickled down or been joined by any more. She glances at him, wondering if that’s correct. He gently wipes it away to confirm that it truly has clotted and sealed. “Seven seconds…” he says under his breath. 

“Is that good?” she asks 

“It’s faster than the average,” he replies. Then, he takes his needle and does the same. She watches his hand, and can actually see the difference. Where her finger produced a bead of blood right at the site of puncture, his barely manages that. It turns red, then vanishes without so much as a trace of trauma. He stares at his fingers, and she can feel his despair growing. 

“It was just luck,” Andy tells him. “I just got lucky.”

“We don’t know how it works. Maybe the radiation changed things.”

“If radiation changed things, we’d have noticed in Chernobyl. In Nagasaki. It hasn’t changed anything.” 

“We weren’t mortal then. Maybe it can jump start it, maybe—”

“—Nicky.” She squeezes his hand. Finally, he looks up. “It’s my time, Nicky.” 

“I don’t want it to be.” 

“I know.” She pulls him toward her. “I don’t want it either. But...I can’t pretend that it’s better. Neither can you.” Nicky’s nose drops to Andy’s shoulder. He clings to her. She squeezes him as tight as she can. She’s not ready to lose everything. Not yet. She doesn’t want to spend her last few months surrounded by abject misery as they all wait for her to keel over. She just wants to hold them. Love them. Enjoy her time with them.

She wishes he could just go back to school and finish up and be happy. Wishes so much that she could tell him it’s going to be okay. That she’ll be fine. That his guess is correct. It _is_ strange that she survived. But she won’t lie to him. Won’t give him false hope. “Can you...can you come back to England with us?” she asks. “Just for a day or two. Booker and Nile can help Joe get his things together to move back to Malta with you and I...I’d like to see you for a few days more if I can.” 

“I should take a leave of absence,” he whispers. 

It breaks her heart that he has to choose at all. “No. Finish school. I’ll tell you when I start feeling worse. But...the doctors said I’m stable right now so—” 

“—You should be _dead,”_ he reminds her. She shrugs. She’s heard that so many times before, that it feels natural to just accept that sometimes things are weird. Still. It’d be nice if he was right. She wishes she could keep doing this. Wishes she could keep helping people. Keep doing the job that she’s been doing all along. And now that Quynh is doing better...she wishes she had more time. 

* * *

When they get back home, Andy isn’t surprised in the least when Joe and Nicky make themselves as scarce as Nile and Booker do. Quynh and her share the space of the safe house that’s been their home since all of this started to become normal. Andy feels tired and more than a little worn out, and Quynh rectifies this by cooking food for her. Offering to run her a bath. Checking in more than once. It’s a kindness that makes Andy flush in delight. 

Nile invites them all over to her place the following evening, though, as a final send off before Joe and Nicky go back to Malta. Andy sleeps through most of the day prior to dinner, dreaming about Lykon and their times together. She wonders if she’ll see him again once she finally goes. If he’s been waiting all this time for them to come together at last. When Quynh nudges her awake, quietly asking if she’s feeling up to dinner, Andy drags herself up. 

She takes a shower, rubbing at the scabs so the top layer comes off, revealing pink skin underneath. They don’t bleed, and she hums a little as she runs her fingers over the smooth skin. She’d thought they’d have lasted longer. Nicky seemed sure that they would. Either way, she’s glad to not have to worry about their endless irritation anymore. 

She dresses in a t-shirt and long sleeved top that hides the worst of the lesions from sight. She doesn’t need anyone staring at her or stressing more than they already do. Even Nile’s been hesitant. For days while the hospital staff ran test after test on Andy, Nile had been standing right there looking so uncertain about everything. She almost wished that Nicky took her with him when he disappeared to sulk. If only so Andy didn’t have to feel _eyes_ on the back of her neck every single moment of the day. 

Driving is an exhausting effort, but it doesn’t take long to reach the apartment. Andy lets herself in, yelling her greeting as Nile emerges from the back. Something that smells almost decent is rising up from the kitchen. “Joe and Nicky are here. My God did I forget how good Nicky can cook,” Nile informs. She hugs Andy, and tosses a _what’s up_ head jerk towards Quynh. Quynh mimics the action, smiling a little at being so included. 

Andy hadn’t thought to bring anything, and doesn’t find it to be necessary in the least. She walks into the kitchen and is overwhelmed. Delicious food and teasing voices. Joe chattering to Nicky in Italian as Booker pours wine into fine crystal glasses. The smell of the chicken as it roasts in the oven. The flavors of vegetables as Nicky makes vaguely stabbing gestures toward Joe when he steals some green pepper slices to eat raw. 

If she died tomorrow, at least she had tonight, and Andy relishes in the sound of her name on their lips. On how Nicky leans over from where he’s chopping to kiss her cheeks. On how Joe wraps her up in his usual bearhug—it barely makes her wince despite the pain still lingering in her back just that morning. On how Booker hands her some wine and pulls out a chair as if she’s the guest of honor. 

“Reminds me of Thanksgiving,” Nile says as she plops into a seat to Andy’s right. “Everyone trying to steal food before it’s done.”

“Hey, new tradition, yeah?” Joe offers, snatching one more green pepper before he throws his hands up in defeat. Nicky’s dropped feigning polite and is now actively cursing at him in the old tongue of his people. “Next time a mission goes bad we do over the top family dinner to make up for it.” 

“If by over the top you mean flying out your very tired husband from his ambulance shift to make you all eat something that contains more than just a starch and pre-processed cheese, then yes,” Nicky says, side eyeing Booker and Nile, “It’s quite over the top.” 

Booker gets Quynh a glass of wine too before he waves a hand at Nicky. “Don’t knock it ‘till you try it, Nile’s not wrong. That shit’s pretty good.” 

Nicky’s nose scrunches he shakes his head and continues adding his vegetables into his pan. He hasn’t looked at Quynh since she arrived. Andy watches the space between the two of them. Quynh’s aware of it, certainly. She’s sitting as far away as she can while still being in the room, and she hasn’t actively drawn any attention to herself. She’s frowning, though. Watching Nicky work. And Nicky’s back has a line of tension in it that doesn’t fit naturally with their usual family gatherings. It isn’t as frantic or immediately filled with the terror she’d seen back in Malta when he’d thought she might be there, but it’s present. A lingering reminder that even if they had come to some sort of truce on that oil rig, it has not erased the past or trauma between them. Merely muddied the waters from being too clear. 

Joe loiters at Nicky’s side, teasing and happy. He’s a touchstone, Andy knows. A touchstone so that if Nicky needs a moment’s respite he can get it. And he’s trying. They’re all trying. That’s the best place to start. “Speaking of bad missions,” Joe calls out when Nicky tells him to start setting the bread on the table. He does as he’s bid, following commands with breathless ease. “Last time we had one you said humanity could burn for all you cared.” He waggles his brows at Andy who huffs at the reminder. “Still feeling like the world can go screw itself?” 

She feels eyes on her. Booker and Nile. Quynh. Nicky’s staying focused on finalizing their dinner, but she can see from the angle of his head that he’s listening. “There are good people in this world,” she says. “There are good people who make mistakes too...But there are bad people out there who are actually bad. I think those good people still deserve saving. Even if sometimes there are assholes who try to make you forget good people exist.” 

“I’ll drink to that,” Joe says. He raises his glass and the others follow suit. Nicky licks his fingers off and calls for them to wait a moment as he fetches a hand towel and a glass of wine for himself. When they’re ready, Joe clears his throat and says: “To good people.” They click their glasses together once and all of them take a drink. 

The wine is a fruity bouquet that makes Andy’s mouth water. She hums appreciatively around it, feeling better than she has in years. She drinks just enough to know she’ll want more, then stands as the others start chattering amongst themselves. 

Nicky opens the oven and removes his roast. He uses dish towels to protect his hands from the heat and once he gets the platter in position, he tosses the towels over his shoulder. “How are you feeling?” he asks her quietly when she approaches. She leans against the counter and watches as he starts inspecting the meat to ensure it’s the right temperature. 

“Good,” she admits. He waits, but she doesn’t elaborate. There’s nothing really more to say. “Thanks for staying.” She knows how hard it is for him. He smiles at her. Warm and full of love. 

“Always,” he promises. He steps closer and wraps his arms around her body. She sighs into his embrace. He always did give the best hugs. She cups the back of his neck, breathing him in. When they’re done, she lets her hand fall to the counter, leaning there to adjust her weight.

Only, it isn’t the counter. It’s the platter he’d just removed. Pain slashes through her hand and she hisses, jerking it back. Immediately his fingers wrap around hers and spreads her palm out to inspect the damage. 

And together, they watch as her hand, like their family, heals.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Thank you to everyone for going on this journey with me. I'm not sure if this series will continue, but I'd be happy to hear thoughts and prompts. If I can I'll write it, but otherwise I think this will be the last full major part of the series.

**Author's Note:**

> You can find/prompt me at falcon-fox-and-coyote.tumblr.com


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